i could cry power
by ghoulfern
Summary: "I have to get the hell away from here," she said finally, peeling herself away from Hancock. His hands hovered near her arms, like he didn't know whether he could touch her still, so she took a step back, turned away from him. Everything felt wrong. And then his voice came from behind her, and said what she'd least expected to hear: "Then let's get the hell away from here."
1. mess

The first time Amelia met Hancock, she was careening through the doors to Goodneighbor, screaming something about 'big green men' and 'fuckin' _nukes!_ '. Her dark hair was in two wild tangles that could barely qualify as braids anymore, and her face was so impossibly _pale_. Most of the people who were standing around in the square didn't even think to help her, they seemed so in awe of the sight of her there, heaving her small, battered body through the doors and bleeding all over the place. They had heard her coming before she even came through, and Hancock had come out to see what was going on, grumbling something about being 'interrupted', Fahrenheit smirking at his heel, gun drawn.

As soon as Amelia saw him, she seemed to think him some sort of twisted savior, her eyes wide and swimming with tears at the sight of him. She had fallen forward, landed almost as if to grovel at his feet, and then puked directly onto his boots.

"OhmyGodI'msosorry," she said breathlessly, turning her face up to stare at him. He was far too taken aback by her skin, nearly glowing in the sun it was so bright and pure, to even notice the bile on his shoes. She had freckles all over her face and the darkest eyes on someone who wasn't a ghoul that he'd ever seen. And behind all the fear and shock, she looked… sorrowful. He didn't quite know what he was looking at, and it took him a long while to come to. Fahrenheit nudged him with her shoulder and he started, stepped back from the girl.

"Uh," he began, his voice wavering. He was still feeling hazy from a hit of Jet taken not 15 seconds earlier and mused for a moment that this whole thing might even be a hallucination. "It's fine." His usual assuredness had returned a little, and he bent to hold his hand out to her. She stared at it uncertainly before reaching to take it, so gently it was startling. No one in this world was so soft, even other smoothskins. It was like she had fallen from the sky, straight from another world.

He lifted her gingerly to standing and placed a hand against her back to steady her. She was wearing filthy leathers and some pilfered shoulder pads and it just looked… off. He thought to himself that she'd look more normal in a vault suit.

Still looking dazed, she turned to meet his eye. Some color had begun to return to her cheeks. "Sorry," she rasped, wiping her mouth off with the back of her hand. She grinned. "Got absolutely wrecked by some weird… big… things, over there. Mutants? Or something." She gestured vaguely to the entrance, her expression twisting into disgust. She then lifted her arm in example: it was bleeding so heavily through a huge gash in her leathers that he couldn't see a wound. Fahrenheit stirred from behind him and sidled forward, peering down at the smoothskin's arm, suddenly interested.

"Yikes," she murmured, a gloved hand fluttering near Amelia's arm. "We need to get you into the State House." She glanced up to Hancock briefly, as if she needed the approval, but he waved her off absently.

"Of course," he said. His hand fell away from the girl. "Go… go get Amari, I'll get the girl up there, get some drugs in her." He grinned despite himself.

"Careful not to put your hands anywhere they shouldn't be," Fahrenheit muttered gruffly before darting away. He frowned after her, at the tinkling laugh that she had left behind. _Troublemaker_.

"Um," the girl said from beside him, and he turned to look at her. She stood there, smiling sheepishly, and nodded toward the State House. "I can walk. Is that… the place?" Hancock felt very stupid for keeping her out here so long.

"Yeah," he said. He cleared his throat. "Sorry about this strange introduction to our little hamlet." She began slowly across the square, her eyes twitching every step or so from pain. The curious crowds were beginning to disperse, except for Daisy, who stood watching from her shop, arms crossed. He looked down to the girl's legs and saw that, beneath the rolled-up cuffs of her pants, they were pretty bruised up too. He hurried to catch up to her, his hand gravitating toward her back again. "You can walk, my ass."

The girl smiled, looking at him sideways. Her eyes narrowed, the color catching in the sunlight just enough to make Hancock hesitate. They looked like pools of cold Nuka-Cola and he thought, wildly, that he wanted to drink them up. "I'm tough," she said. She pushed open the door with her shoulder and shuffled inside, Hancock reaching to hold it open the rest of the way for her. "Wow," she murmured as soon as they came in, head slowly tilting to follow the spiral staircase upward. "Fancy place for a fancy dude, huh?" She was looking at him again, but Hancock was trying to get her to safety and it was far too distracting to try to pay attention to her.

"Sure is," he said, his tone almost boastful enough to make up for his careless bumbling in the square earlier. He nudged her toward the staircase and up she went, pretty quick. He was impressed. Her hand trailed along the railing as she went, fingers just barely touching the polished mahogany. It was like watching a princess ascend delicately into heaven.

Once they made it up, her awe seemed to double. She looked around, eyes bouncing from room to room. He watched her amusedly. "Room's through there," he said, pointing toward his space. The bed was right in the center and, lavish and huge and decorated as it was, he felt almost embarrassed for her to see it, even to have to lie in it. It seemed… perverse. But he guided her over anyway and she, with a groan, willingly flopped backward onto it, holding her arm aloft so as to not stain the sheets. Thoughtful.

"You okay with Med-X? Jet?" he asked, settling in a chair beside her and reaching to pull open the drawer to his nightstand. He was sifting around inside, looking for the proper drugs in all of the other drugs, when she sat up, fast. He shifted his gaze to look at her.

"Jet? That shit used to be sort of illegal," she said. Then, she laughed. It was so light, but it had an almost manic edge to it. "Not that it stopped me back in the day." She met his eye again, boldly, and grinned.

"Back…?" His jaw went slack. Suddenly, it made sense, the way she looked. Like she had stepped right out of a billboard ad from 200 years ago. _No fuckin' way_. "You can't be pre-war?" He searched her shining eyes, hand submerged and forgotten in the contents of the nightstand drawer.

"I guess that's what you'd call it," she said, leaning back onto her uninjured arm. Her small frame eased effortlessly backward, her movements languid and careful. No wonder she'd survived long enough out of a vault to get here; everything she did, even something so trivial as laying back on the bed, seemed calculated, measured. "Anyway, hit me with it, my whole body is _killing_ me right now." She fell back onto the bed again, sprawled out, and shut her eyes. "I would _love_ to be high right now. Would've helped me loads in that fight." She scoffed.

Hancock sat perplexed for a very long minute until his eyes caught onto her bloody arm again, and then he was digging back through his stash and unearthing an inhaler and some Med-X. He scooted over to her in his chair and tapped her knee with one finger. She stirred and sat up. The smile was gone, replaced with teeth bared in pain. "Shot me a couple times with a… shotgun, I think," she said distantly, reaching to take the Jet from his outstretched hand. "It was _close_ , way too close." She brought it to her lips and took three practiced, quick huffs, then set it down on the bed beside her. Hancock blinked, Med-X limp in one hand. She tilted her head, tired eyes meeting his. "What's your name, Mr. Revolutionary?"

He leaned forward, reaching for her good arm, and she stretched out to give it to him. He found her veins immediately, popping blue and lush through her nearly translucent inner elbow. He resisted the urge to say 'wow' aloud. "Hancock," he said instead. "I'm the Mayor here." It was an introduction devoid of its usual theatrics, but he didn't mind it. He pushed the needle in and she hissed, turning her head away. He looked up, eyes concerned, but she shook her head.

"Just… a little scared of needles," she breathed. She released a big sigh and turned back to look at him. "Hancock, though?" Her eyes flashed. "So, you're a patriot, huh?" She gave him a lopsided smile, tossed one of her loose braids over her shoulder as if she had a habit of doing so.

"Could say that," he said, leaning back in his chair. He kicked his boots off and nudged them away from the bed. She followed their trajectory and, when he looked back toward her, she was laughing softly behind her hand. "What?"

"Just funny, that I retched all over your shoes soon as I got here," she said, her voice tinged with embarrassed amusement. "I did that on my first day of high school, too, but then, I hadn't been shot or beaten half to death. Sometimes my nerves would just get to me."

Hancock arched an eyebrow at her. "High school?"

She nodded, her long braids bobbing with the motion. "Yeah, like… I don't know, it's school. Went there to learn stuff, like math. You guys don't have that here huh?" She wrinkled up her nose and looked over his shoulder to stare out the window. "I've been out of that cryo-whatever for a month, you'd think it's been two days with the way I'm acting all shell-shocked." She sighed, eyes falling to her lap. Before he could question what the hell she meant by 'cryo-whatever', she said, "I should tell you my name—it's Amelia."

He was about to open his mouth, say some bullshit line like 'beautiful name for a beautiful girl', when Amari and Fahrenheit came bounding up the stairs, Fahrenheit leading the way with a box of stimpaks in her arms and a panicked expression on her usually impassive face. Hancock furrowed his brow at her and reluctantly pushed his chair away from the bed to let them in closer.

"You are beaten to _shit!_ " Fahrenheit exclaimed immediately, squatting down to get a bewildered look at Amelia's exposed calves. "You can't have gotten all of this today, kid." Hancock watched curiously as Amelia flushed and looked away over Fahrenheit's shoulder, toward him. He felt for a moment as if they were sharing a secret, but then she turned away again.

"Fine, I'm scared of doctors, alright? Haven't seen one since…" she paused, eyes darting around, away from anyone's face. "…in a while."

Amari tutted from next to Fahrenheit, brandishing a Super Stimpak that had even Hancock staring with his mouth agape. "You're gonna use one of them things on _her_?" he exclaimed, standing from his chair. "How the fuck you even get your hands on that? Think you can fetch some Daytripper for me, while you're at it?" He, despite himself, glanced over to Amelia, and saw that she looked utterly mortified, her eyes focused on the Stimpak and its attached leather belt.

Amari heaved a sigh and fixed him with a look of pure exasperation and disdain. "Look, John, I'd rather not be here all day."

He held his hands up, mouth tightening into a humorless grimace. "Sorry, sister, carry on. Won't bother ya' anymore."

Amari, to Amelia's visible relief, set the Super Stimpak down on the bed and kneeled to examine her arm with gloved hands instead. She tilted her head, wiping away some of the congealed blood, then leaned away. "Brought it _just in case_ , considering Fahrenheit here came in screaming about a girl beaten half to death, but it's through-and-through. Nothing broken, either," she mumbled, reaching into her lab coat and extracting a normal Stimpak. She uncapped it and, before Amelia could protest, plunged it directly into her arm.

Hancock had never seen anyone react so violently to a simple Stimpak before. Amelia shrieked so loudly a raven that had been sitting out on the window sill flew away screaming. She clapped a hand to her mouth, looking desperately away from her arm. She squirmed underneath the needle, little whimpers still escaping around her palm. Her gaze settled determinedly on the Vaultboy bobblehead that sat on Hancock's nightstand, like she was trying to ground herself. He watched her as tears formed in her eyes and spilled down onto her cheeks. Fahrenheit stood up, looked down at her, then back at him. She squinted her eyes as if saying _what the fuck?_ but he shook his head.

Amari extracted the Stimpak once it had drained, stood up, and cracked her neck, looking entirely disinterested in the whole ordeal. "I'll be going. She should be fine but needs to rest for a few days. I imagine you're capable of taking care of her, John?" She was looking at him all disapproving again and he nodded, if anything just to spite her.

"You're free to go," he said, saluting her off and smiling cockily. He would have seen her out if it hadn't been for the whispers he heard behind him (and how fast she left the room, descending the stairs so quickly that he couldn't have possibly caught her). When he turned, Fahrenheit sat beside Amelia on the bed, her arm around her. He'd _never_ seen his gal so ready to comfort someone else before, but, then he saw Amelia's face. She was pale again, pale as ever, and she looked even sicker than before.

"You're alright," Fahrenheit was whispering, smoothing back stray locks of hair from Amelia's forehead. "You're okay."

Hancock felt a little like he was intruding, and slowly sidled out of the room, shutting the doors gently behind him. He turned and stood there, bracing himself against the doors, and stared up at the ceiling. What a fuckin' day.

* * *

Amelia sat on the edge of the bed, her hands resting on her knees, and took another huff of Jet. The cold inhaler felt so familiar and strange on her lips, something from the old world intertwining with the new. She gazed around the room slowly, absorbing the torn pinup posters hanging on the walls, the clutter on the nightstand, the bookshelf with more novels shoved into it than she'd seen throughout her entire journey. She felt like she was in a dream, like this whole world and all of its people were a dream, and any moment now, she'd awaken, snuggled into her clean bed, the sounds of her baby nephew cooing softly in the night putting her right back to sleep.

She knew she must be dreaming, because who in their right mind dressed like famed American patriot John Hancock, swaggered underneath an absurd tricorn hat, welcomed a screaming girl into his town with a warmth she thought had died with the bombs? The moment she'd crashed through the gates and spotted him coming toward her, it was like seeing a picture out of one of her old history textbooks. He'd reminded her so much of being home, away from this wasteland; a man torn from a past that she recognized, had learned about. A constant, carried through to the end of the world.

The door creaked open and she jerked out of her sleepy reverie to see Hancock peeking his face into the room. She smiled.

"Come to check up on me?" she asked. Her speech was slow, eyelids heavy. She lifted her bandaged arm up and smiled at him. "Doesn't hurt anymore."

Hancock stepped gingerly in through the crack in the door and shut it tightly behind him. He looked so strange wearing his big red coat in a bedroom so real and cluttered. Like hers had been, before. "Yeah, after that Stimpak thing, wasn't sure you'd make it," he said with a chuckle, crossing the room to sit next to her. He looked unsure of himself as he did it, she noticed. Even past ruined skin and a missing nose, she could read someone so easily. "You know, you really oughta lay down and rest."

"I'm doing okay," she insisted, despite the ache in her shoulders. She couldn't handle any more needles today. Her eyes found the bookshelf in the corner again, and she turned to face him fully. "How did you get so many books?" she asked. The question had a wistful edge to it that she cursed. She didn't want to be sad here, in this dream. She didn't want it to be a nightmare. "I've only seen a few in the time I've been here, and they were all… destroyed."

A look of surprise stole across Hancock's face before it was replaced with something else, something tender. He reached up and rubbed at the back of his neck, looking away. "Collected 'em over the years. I'd sneak into libraries as a kid," he said, his eyes resting fondly on the bookshelf. "Before the super mutants got to 'em, there was a lot of stuff in there."

"I…" She paused, feeling stupid, but he was looking at her again. "I used to be a librarian," she admitted. "You know, before all this shit." If she hadn't been slowed by the Jet high, she might have choked on her words a little, a sob may have escaped from her lips, but everything felt so delayed and muffled, like she was speaking through honey. She didn't want it to end, this numbness.

"Librarian, huh?" Hancock laughed, popped something into his mouth. She glanced over at him questioningly. "Orange Mentats," he explained, producing a small tin from inside his coat. He flipped the lid open and held it out to her. Against her better judgment, she took one.

"I used to take these before tests," she said, placing it deftly onto her tongue and biting down. The chalky flavor set in, despite the artificial taste, and her expression soured. "God, don't taste any better, do they?" She glanced up and he was already looking at her, his smile bemused.

"I'm used to it, smoothskin, but that's because I eat 'em like candy," he said, tossing another tablet into his mouth in example.

Amelia raised her eyebrows at him. " _Smoothskin_ , huh?"

"Yeah, that's what we call you humans."

"And you're not a human?" Amelia frowned at him, but he shrugged, unbothered.

"No, I'm a ghoul."

She knitted her brows together, her eyes searching his face. "But you _were_ a human? So surely that means you still are."

Hancock shook his head, a small laugh gracing his ravaged lips. "Semantics," he said, waving a hand at her. "Sure, I used to be human, but now I ain't. I can basically live forever, I can suck up radiated water like juice. You can't do that, can you?" He was staring at her then, waiting for her to say something, but the mix of Jet and Mentats was starting to stir up the thoughts in her brain. She saw something in his eyes again, that weird sincerity and warmth, but it was overt this time, she could _see_ it, concretely. It startled her.

"You think I'm different," she found herself saying through the haze. The words surprised her. "I came out of a vault, and you don't understand it." He looked caught, his usually lethargic body stiffening under the weight of her eyes. She sighed and found the bookshelf again, scanning the fading spines and recognizing so many of the titles. She could almost feel them underneath her fingers as she tucked them one by one into their shelves. "I'm not different," she said at last. " _We're_ not different."

Hancock shifted to lay back on his elbows. "Damn, sister, you sure ripped me a new one. Remind me never to offer you Mentats again."

"Remind me never to take them again if you do," she said. She sucked her teeth and looked over at him. She felt he had not stopped looking at her since she'd arrived. "I probably should rest though, I have… things to get back to." An unpleasant thought crossed her mind. The rough voice of a stranger, a gunshot ringing through time. She shook her head, shook it out of her. "Thanks for drugging me up." She smiled, and it felt real. Everything around her felt real, somehow. It couldn't be a dream. There's no way she could have thought this all up by herself.

Hancock shifted and stood from the bed, turned to look down at her. "Get some rest, then, Sunshine," he said.

Amelia watched him saunter out and shut the door behind him, watched long after he'd gone. Weird guy. But she could get used to him.


	2. grief

Doctor Amari was back and pissed off as ever.

"She will be fine," she said as she bandaged Amelia's injured arm none-too-gently. Hancock hovered over her shoulder to watch, while Fahrenheit stood in the doorway munching on her fingernails. "Only some minor bleed-through, nothing to be worried for. May have been jostled in sleep."

"Thanks, Doc," Hancock said. His face was apologetic as he guided her back out of the room, but once they were at the top of the stairs, she batted his hand away from her.

"I'm serious, John, take _care_ of her." She said this as if she meant _don't interrupt me for this again._ Then, she was gone.

Amelia sat awkwardly in the bed, staring down at her newly bandaged arm. It had begun to bleed sometime in the night and she'd woken up to the warm sensation of liquid on her skin. She'd panicked, yelling blindly for _Nora,_ and when Hancock and Fahrenheit came rushing in instead, both visibly mussed up from sleep, the scream had died in her throat. For a moment, she couldn't remember for the life of her who these two people were, and then suddenly she knew. The realization had alarmed her to a point where she began hysterically crying, and Fahrenheit had looked to Hancock all exasperated, shaking her head.

"Not tonight," she muttered, poking a finger into his chest. "Your turn."

And so, he'd sat next to her on the bed, whispering things to her that she could barely understand through her sleepy gloom and, at one point, reaching out to smooth her hair gently back from her face. It was something Nora used to do, when they were younger and Amelia had night terrors in their shared bedroom. Eventually, she stopped crying, and Hancock left to grab Amari. Amelia had stared at the soft divot he'd left in the sheets until they came back, Fahrenheit trailing behind.

Now, Amelia felt shameful. Fahrenheit was already departing, grumbling something about having plans the next day, and Hancock stood just outside the room, staring uncertainly down the stairs.

"We should probably hire an actual doctor, huh?" he muttered to no one in particular, as Fahrenheit had just entered her room and shut the door behind her.

Amelia watched him stand there for a moment before saying hoarsely, "hey, at least she does the job alright."

Hancock turned to look at her as if just remembering she was there. "Oh, sorry," he said, waving a hand toward her as he came walking back into the room. He was devoid of his usual garb, wearing a t-shirt and some pants instead. The hat was still there, though. It almost looked weirder to her, this casual wear. He hovered near the doors, staring at her in the dim light from the moon. "Not to be weird, but, you alright, sleeping in this giant room alone?"

Despite her damp eyes and self-induced congestion, she managed to shoot back, "why, you interested?", smiling. Then, it faded. She ducked her head down so she wouldn't see his reaction. "No, I'm okay, just… not used to this kind of thing. Injury. Blood." She shrugged. "Thanks, though."

"Alright, smoothskin." He seemed reluctant to go, inching backward with his hands on either doorknob. "Get some sleep," he said, slipping out and shutting the doors behind him.

* * *

Amelia woke to see Nora, staring wide-eyed at her from her own cryochamber. Amelia blinked sleepily, reaching a hand out in front of her only to touch frosty glass. What was she doing here? Voices were coming from every direction, strangers' voices. She couldn't understand them, at first, but she saw them. People in white suits and… some guy? He was wearing armor, it looked like, and he was approaching Nora. _No_. She swallowed hard, and her throat was so impossibly dry that it hurt. The shout of protest inside her head was suddenly there and furious. Something was wrong.

"This one, right here," a woman said. The door to Nora's chamber hissed and lifted, and she almost stumbled all the way out, coughing. She held Shaun in her arms. _Shaun_.

"Are we out?" Nora asked, her voice muffled. She looked around at the strangers, before her gaze finally settled on Amelia. "Are we safe?" It was like she was asking her directly. She wanted to shake her head, willed her to get back in the chamber. The thoughts in her head were maddening, piling up on one another frantically.

The scene seemed to fade in and out of focus, then. Amelia began to bang weakly at the window of her chamber, but it was dull, almost soundless. Futile. She opened her mouth to yell as the man lifted a pistol, but her chapped lips ripped before she could get the sound out. Everything hurt.

She watched numbly. Her sister, all dark under-eye circles from her tireless hours getting her law degree, her dark brown hair dewy with melting ice. The iron grip she had on her son, Amelia's nephew, the boy she'd helped raise in Nate's absence. Amelia's fist stayed pressed up against the window as she watched. It was all she could do, even when the gun shot rang out and Nora slumped back, glassy eyes staring straight at Amelia. What could she have done?

 _More_.

Amelia sat up rigid in the bed, chest heaving.

She still didn't understand what had happened that day. The scarred man seemed to chastise her in her head every moment she was awake, telling her in his rough voice that she could've done more. Could have broken out of the chamber and stopped them, somehow. Now, he was haunting her in her sleep.

It took her a while to be able to lay back and shut her eyes again. Nora used to be the one to comfort her when she'd wake up out of a nightmare, ever the protective older sister. She'd sing a lullaby in her ear, faint and pleasantly lilting- _you are my sunshine, my only sunshine…-_ rubbing her temples with her thumb until she drifted back to sleep. Amelia tried to imagine it now— _you make me happy, when skies are grey…-_ the soft hum, the warmth of someone awake and present sitting beside her. Eventually, it lulled her back to sleep. She didn't dream.

* * *

It was a few days later when Amelia woke up in a frenzied hurry to feed Shaun his afternoon bottle, worrying that she'd slept past her alarm. Nora would be _pissed_ if she did that again and she did _not_ feel like dealing with that. The other day, she'd missed it because the vault guy had come to get their information and it took way too long and why was Amelia doing this anyway? But Nora was at work, like usual, and Nate was… well, gone. Thank God he was, but it still left Amelia with nearly every responsibility.

She threw off the blanket, all sweaty panic in her underclothes as she hurried bleary-eyed out of bed. It was only after she'd scrambled fully out from under the duvet, tripped over an empty Jet canister on the floor, and fallen on her face, that she realized Shaun was gone, _she_ was gone. She was not at home in Sanctuary Hills, she was… here, in some post-war world where everyone was dirty and mean. She may have appreciated the sunlight pouring in through the windows if she wasn't sprawled on hands and feet on the floor, about to sob.

" _Shit_ ," she muttered, sniffling despite herself. Now she was gonna cry. Great. She pushed herself up onto her knees and sat there staring at the floorboards, tears falling at first slowly, and then streaming down her cheeks. It was a moment long enough for a soft knock to sound from the other side of the door. Resignedly, she called, "come in," knowing already it could only be one of two people.

It was Hancock who came through this time. "You okay, smoothskin?" he asked quietly. She noticed, in her freshly awakened daze, that he was still wearing the stupid hat despite his casual clothes, but it was crooked on his head, as if he'd just thrown it on. It was early, if the rising sun wasn't enough evidence. He must have been sleeping somewhere before she fell over. He seemed out of breath, too, now that she paid attention. Hastily, she wiped her face with the back of one hand.

"Yeah, I just… tripped," Amelia admitted sheepishly, feeling stupid for having woken him up in her panic, _again_. She reluctantly stood up, but as she did her weak legs trembled and sent her tumbling back onto the bed. She let out a groan as she fell into the duvet. "I thought I… you know, forget it." She shook her head dejectedly, threw the blanket over her head. Maybe if he couldn't see her, she'd disappear. "Doesn't matter anymore."

Slowly, Hancock shut the door behind him and crossed the room to sit at the edge of the bed beside her. "You know, you can stick around as long as you want," he said, sinking into the mattress and leaning over to pluck the blanket off her face. She turned to look at him, and he was smiling kindly. She hadn't expected him to say _that_ , she'd expected him to ask what was wrong. To pry. After all, it's what everyone had done the entire time she'd been out of the vault. The morbid curiosity of others was what got her there, all the way to Goodneighbor. Who are you, what's wrong? Oh, you should go to Diamond City. _The great green yada yada._ "You were… pretty roughed up when you came in here."

She realized dimly that she was frowning at him. "Yeah, I was," she agreed. She tried out a shy smile and sat back up slowly. He scooted away so she'd have room to sit beside him, even though there was more than enough space for her already there. "You have any idea how long I was limping around the Commonwealth because I was too stubborn to find a doctor?" She shook her head, laughing to herself. "Idiot… nearly got my leg blown off outside of Diamond City but I couldn't be bothered. Stimpaks were an emergency back in my time, I've never even used one before now. Wasn't about to shove one of those giant needles into myself." She shook her head, staring down at her lap, before reality seemed to catch up to her and she looked up again to meet his eyes. He looked amused. "Enough about me and my bad decisions, anyway. Why are you always wearing that hat?"

Hancock's eyebrows shot up. "Oh, this?" he asked, pointing to the tricorn. "Premature balding. Embarrassing stuff." His face broke out into a grin. He had some pretty straight teeth for someone in a post-apocalyptic world, she mused. Maybe they had running water and toothbrushes in this place after all.

"Uh huh, and how old are you exactly?" Amelia heard the teasing quality of her voice, and it felt foreign, to joke in this unfamiliar other-world. But it felt good, too, especially with someone who was so willing to do it with her.

"I'd never give up that information," Hancock said, matching her tempo smoothly. He leaned toward her, close enough to bump her shoulder with his. "Younger than you, though." He winked.

"Alright, so, you're younger than _two-hundred_." She nodded solemnly. "That narrows it down. And, hey, anyway, I'm _really_ only 26."

They sat like that for a few minutes, in something like companionable silence, their shoulders just barely touching. Sun continued to pour through the window and Amelia watched as shadows passed minutely across the gold-drenched floor. "This place," she began, her voice quietly cutting through the hush they'd created, "is the most genuine place I've seen so far. It's… real."

She turned to face him and caught him staring out the window, picking absently at a loose thread on his pants. It was odd to see him that way, after watching him come stomping into the square almost a week ago, all mayoral and confident, the crowd falling still in his presence. He reminded her of a pirate, like the ones she'd watched in old movies. He had a spirit, a sort of tenacity, that cascaded out of him with everything he did. Even knowing him in the small capacity that she did, she could recognize that. Any stranger could. But in this moment, so vulnerable and contemplative, she felt like she was seeing something she should not be. She almost felt compelled to look away.

"That's always been the goal here, sister," he said gruffly, his eyes scanning the structures outside. She watched as his throat bobbed uncomfortably. "I don't subscribe to the Diamond City bullshit. The prejudice there. Here, we're free."

Amelia watched his gaze search for something outside the window, and felt a point she'd made the day she met him threatening to come out of her mouth again. _All of us, human. All of us, equal._ But she didn't say anything. It felt wrong for her to interject.

Hancock smiled wistfully, his dark eyes catching orange from the sun. "Of the people, for the people," he said heavily. The way it came out of his mouth felt like a burden. After a moment, he lifted himself up from the bed and stretched his arms, his voice returning to a more playful tone as he said, "listen, you rest easy up here, I'll show you around later." She stared up at him, her hands limp in her lap and her cheeks still damp, and nodded. He gave her a jaunty little salute and sauntered away out the door before she had time to process the change that his absence had brought her.

Amelia stayed there on the edge of the bed, eyes numbly roaming about the sun-soaked room, until she spotted an open, rotten book resting on the floor by her feet. Leaning down, she picked it up and flipped it closed to see the name on the front: _To Kill a Mockingbird._ She snorted and opened it to the title page. Scrawled below the author's name, with the messy handwriting of a young boy, was the name _John M._

Amari called him John, and here it was again. Was it his real name, as well as his bizarre historical alias? She reached out to trace her finger over the worn charcoal _J_ , all swooping extravagance only a child could lend to his own signature. She imagined it couldn't be much different to how he wrote his name now. Proud.

* * *

Eight hours later, the just-setting sun had begun to cast a sleepy shadow through the State House. Hancock was climbing the stairs up to his room with Ham trailing behind him and the weathered Rail bouncer was ranting as they went. Something about how Whitechapel Charlie was such a _dick_ earlier, you should've heard him with his dumbass accent calling me a moron for askin' for some Brahmin steak, what does it look like, he says to me, _a luxury theatre?_ , I couldn't believe the bullshit that was coming out of him, can't you reprogram the fu—

"Ham," Hancock said evenly, turning to the bouncer once they'd crested the top stair. He smiled. "I have some business. You wanna… I don't know… scram?" He lifted his eyebrows and Ham sprang back into action, nodding and backing up down the stairs.

"Sorry boss," he said, then seemed to stew on a thought. "But… really, could ya' consider messin' around with his circuit boards or some shit so he ain't so damn _mean_ all the time?" Ham turned his eyes up to him hopefully, and it was all Hancock could do not to dropkick him down the staircase.

Instead, he let out a breath and nodded, turning back around. "Sure, Ham, I'll be right on it." He heard Ham scurry down the steps and shut the door.

With reluctance, Hancock approached the door to his room. It stood in front of him like some intimidating monument and, if he'd be made to admit it, Ham's presence _had_ been a good distraction up until then. After he'd left Amelia in a rush earlier in the day, Hancock was worried he'd freaked her out, and he'd put off this whole 'tour' he'd offered her for at least two or three hours longer than he'd meant to. He wouldn't have blamed her if she was halfway out the window when he walked in, making a quick escape on a makeshift rope of bedsheets so she wouldn't have to hang out with the local emotionally damaged ghoul and his hero complex.

What he hadn't expected to see, after he'd knocked politely and opened the door, was her lounging in his bed, propped up on pillows and reading his filthy childhood copy of _To Kill a Mockingbird_. Christ, he hoped she hadn't gotten far enough to see his embarrassing notes in the margin from when he was 17 and thought he was informed about racial injustice.

Cautiously, he cleared his throat and stepped into the room. She held up a finger to him, her face screwed up into concentration as she finished a page, and he stood there waiting, feeling like a total dumbass all the while. She was wearing a big t-shirt she'd gotten from who knows where and it was draped around her all soft. She looked so blissfully normal. Once she was done, she looked up at him with a smile.

"Sorry," she said, blushing. She shifted her feet underneath the covers. It was like looking at a pristine ad from two hundred years ago; he had to consciously keep from smiling stupidly at the sight of her. "Might be predictable of me, but, it's one of my favorites." She shut the book and placed it onto his nightstand, with far more care than he'd bothered with when throwing it on the floor the last time he'd read it. Then, she looked at him, like she was expecting something.

"Mine, too," he said lamely. It wasn't what he'd meant to say, but her smile widened all the same.

"You ready for our night out on the town?" she asked, surprising him as she sprang up from the bed. Her shirt billowed around her knees like a dress and she must have seen him perplexed and staring, because she laughed. "This is from my pack, if you were wondering. Fahrenheit brought it to me the other day. We'd left it in the square after I, you know." She cracked a grin.

Hancock laughed and nodded. "She does seem to like you. Which is weird, because she doesn't like anyone. 'Specially not me." He noticed that her legs were already looking less bruised and more—well. Leggy. They sprouted out from under her shirt-dress, smooth and milky white.

Amelia squatted at her pack beside the bed, sifting around in its contents for something. "You saying I'm not likable?" she shot over her shoulder, her tone of voice chipper. "That _you're_ not likable?"

He chose to ignore the second question. "Well, you are a bit strange, don't get me wrong," Hancock said pleasantly, leaning back against the door behind him. He was about to say something about her habit of barfing on people's shoes when she stood up and began to unabashedly pull a pair of pants on over her legs. He blinked, realizing very quickly what was happening. She had been sitting, in his bed, _in her underwear_. Something in him was short-circuiting, because he said stupidly, "well, yeesh, sister, you ain't shy". All she did was chuckle.

"It's different here. I've made an agreement with myself to stop caring, like everyone else." She hopped around on one foot as she yanked a pant leg on, brows furrowed. He caught a quick glimpse of her thigh as she moved the shirt to jimmy the pants on and, finally, he had to look away to the floor. "Less preoccupied with nudity and standards and whatever."

"Hey, some of us are still preoccupied with nudity," he said nervously, his eyes trying to find something to focus on as he saw her wiggle around in his peripheral vision. Finally, she zipped up and threw her hair over her shoulder. He permitted himself to look back at her and saw that she was bunching up the bottom of her shirt in preparation to pull it over her head. She was free of her braids, and it fell in wild curls around her face.

"If you're so distracted, you might wanna just turn around," she said. She arched an eyebrow at him. "I can't walk around in a pillow case all night."

Against his better judgment, Hancock spun to face the door. She laughed. After a moment of quick rustling, she said, "alright, pal, you can turn around now," and he did, feeling somewhat dazed.

She was wearing a small black t-shirt, leaning down to lift her knapsack up off the floor. She set it on the bed and reached in again, which gave him a mild fright, but she was only fishing out a hair tie. "Aren't you excited to show me around your fair city?" she asked, reaching to twist her hair up into a braid. She watched him, her dark eyes illuminated by candles he hadn't realized she'd lit all around the room. He might have thought she was trying to seduce him, if candles weren't some of the only light sources he had in his room. And if he wasn't ugly as sin.

"Uh, yeah," he said. "So you-uh, you haven't been here before? At all?" He turned the knob behind him and leaned back into it to hold it open wide.

"Nope." She crossed the room toward Hancock, tying off the braid, and slung it over her shoulder right as she passed him. It smelled sweet, something he _certainly_ wasn't used to, and he stood there stunned for a moment before she turned around at the top of the stairs to look at him. "Well? Hurry up." With a grin, she descended.


	3. past

There was something about Hancock that everyone seemed to _get_. As soon as they stepped into The Third Rail—once they were past the bouncer, Ham, who pleaded with him in soft tones about something involving a 'fucking robot'—everyone seemed to gravitate toward him.

They'd stopped by Hotel Rexford before going to the Rail, and everyone in there had scrambled to him, too. One woman grabbed onto his lapels and muttered something close to his ear, to which he nodded and laid a hand on her shoulder. "Later," he'd said, then whispered something too quiet for Amelia to hear, and Amelia watched as she skittered away looking self-satisfied. Huh.

In the bar, Amelia trailed after Hancock, holding onto his coat so she wouldn't get eaten up by the crowd, but her hand kept slipping. She was so distracted by looking around, marveling at it all. The whole place was full, and everyone was laughing against a soundtrack of crooning love songs. She turned and spotted a woman, dazzling in the spotlight, singing into a microphone, but her crimson image was shrouded by someone tall stepping into Amelia's vision. She looked up to see Hancock staring at her, a drink in each hand. He leaned toward her, one arm gravitating behind her to protect from any jostling of nearby bar patrons.

"Hey, sunshine," he said, pressing a drink into her hand. She took it and stared down into its contents. She hadn't drank for a while; this could get messy. "I see you noticed Magnolia. Goes both ways, if you're interested." She looked back up at him to see that he was smirking.

"I'm mostly interested in sitting down, if that's cool with you." She tried to smile, but the energetic crowd was starting to get to her, especially since it was paired with Hancock being an apparent celebrity.

Hancock nodded, his eyes narrowing into something like understanding. He tipped half of his drink into his mouth and began steering her effortlessly through the crowd. Eventually, they found an empty booth in the corner and she sat. He remained standing, swaying slightly. His dark eyes caught the colorful neon lights decorating the bar and they glittered when he looked at her. "Listen," he said, leaning down against the table. "I gotta go make the rounds, you okay by yourself for a sec?" He barely waited for her to nod before he was off, disappearing into the knot of people. A muffled cheer came from the middle of the room, and she could see his tricorn bobbing around as he greeted everyone.

Pretty soon a Mr. Handy unit, one Amelia had a sneaking suspicion was the 'fucking robot' Ham had mentioned earlier, whirred up to her. "What can I get ya', miss?" She almost got whiplash from the thick Cockney accent that came out of the bot, but recovered long enough to ask, "uh, what do you have?"

Soon, the robot was rattling off enough food combinations to make her head spin, but she settled on a sweet roll, since whatever the hell _Mirelurk cakes_ were, she wanted no part of. He zipped away after a weirdly formal salute with one of his appendages.

She sat back in the booth and permitted herself to relax a little. She'd been stuck in the State House for nearly a week now, sleeping most of her days away. It felt good to exist outside of Hancock's bedroom, though the bed _was_ pretty cozy, for a post-war mattress. She lifted her drink to her lips and took a big, courageous sip, only to have to resist the urge to spit it right back out when the irradiated, ancient whiskey hit her tongue. God, that was horrific.

She returned to her people-watching just in time to see that the Rexford woman was back, at Hancock's hip—wait, no, she was hanging around his neck now. He was snaking one arm around her waist while the other loosely held his now empty drink. She'd been thinking that she was doing some heavy cock-blocking, staying in his bedroom and all, but he seemed to have it handled anyway. Maybe they didn't need the bed, after all. More power to him, Amelia thought.

"Hey, stranger." A familiar voice drew her attention, and she turned to see Nick Valentine standing beside the booth, looking as broody-noir as ever. He had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, both of which didn't make _any_ sense to her, but she was happy to see him. She scooted to the left and patted the seat beside her, smiling.

"Nice to see a friendly face," she said. She held up her bandaged arm and smiled sheepishly at him. "Sorry for, uh, disappearing. Got into a scuffle on my way here."

Nick sat and waved her away. "We disappear, we find each other. It's what you and I do," he said solemnly, his golden eyes bright as he looked at her. She felt warm at this, almost said something to agree, but he was off again, changing the subject. "I see you've gotten acquainted with the mayor of this fine city." He nodded toward Hancock, who was now openly swapping spit with Rexford, both of them balancing on a single bar stool. _Okay, so he's a prude about me putting_ pants _on in front of him, but not about this?_

Amelia had no desire to drink any of the alcohol she'd been given, but her throat was _so dry_. "Uh huh," she said thickly, before succumbing and taking a gulp of whiskey. Nick's eyebrow twitched slightly, though his smile remained. "He's a weird… fella." She should just stop talking and be done with it. This was embarrassing, her lack of skills with small talk.

"That's an understatement. Should've seen him before he was a ghoul," Nick chuckled, shaking his head. He took a sip of his own drink but looked reluctant doing so. Amelia's suspicion rang true when he grimaced and set the glass down harder than he'd probably intended. "I forgot how bad the alcohol was here," he muttered, staring now into his glass instead of her, looking mildly betrayed.

"You knew him before he was a ghoul?" Amelia asked.

Nick leaned forward to rest his elbows against the table, and they made a clanking sound upon contact. Constantly, even now, she was convinced that he was human, and then something small like that would appear and remind her that he was not. It was a very strange experience every time. She reached out to hold her glass of whiskey, just to have something to do with her hands, and leaned closer to Nick so she could hear him better.

Amelia hadn't seen him so casual before, tie undone and hat off. Granted, she'd only known him for less than a month, but he seemed like someone who was married to the law (and hence, order and professionalism), even when the law hadn't existed for a couple centuries. "Oh, yeah. Him and his brother were relentless hellions. Mostly John was, though." He laughed quietly, turning his eyes back toward her. "Used to be that I'd come out to the marketplace for some late night noodles and John was hanging from the rafters of Takahashi's tent, screaming like a banshee. Once he was nineteen, it was mostly a whole lot of hitting on various women. If you think these public displays of affection are rough," he said, indicating the nearby tangled up embrace of Hancock and Rexford, "you haven't seen _nothing_." Amelia laughed, imagining Hancock now, wreaking havoc throughout Diamond City in his big red coat and pirate hat.

"You know, even barely knowing him, I believe you," she said, smiling. Nick's face rested into something more relaxed and he sat back in the booth. They sat there in silence for a moment, Amelia nursing the drink she had no intention of finishing.

"It's nice to see him in charge, to be honest," Nick said fondly. "His brother turned out to be a real prick."

Before Amelia could ask anything else, the robot from earlier came back to the table and inelegantly dropped a sweet roll in front of her. "Sorry, love, bit busy tonight," he said shortly, before turning away from her. "Alright, Valentine?" She stared down at the expired pastry, not really knowing whether she wanted to take a bite out of it or throw it clear across the room and see if she could knock anyone out with it. Soon, the two robots were chatting beside her, and Amelia was losing interest. She was beginning to wonder how she'd even gotten there when Hancock approached the table out of seemingly nowhere, as if on cue. Rexford was nowhere in sight.

"Had a detour," he said, sitting down beside her. With Nick on her other side, there was hardly any room for him, so he sat perched on the edge looking mildly uncomfortable. "Wanna hit the road again?"

Amelia was vaguely aware that he was staring at her, a drunk, crooked smile on his face. He hadn't seemed to notice that it was Nick on her other side. For a moment, she thought about shrugging, saying, _no, I'm alright here. You get back to your girl_. After all, she didn't want to take up _all_ of his time. She was already living in his bedroom, eating up resources. All she had was a wounded arm that had already been treated. If anything, she should have been on her way already. She should have been finding Shaun.

What came out of her mouth instead was, "absolutely." Because she didn't want it to be true that now, with Nora gone, Shaun was entirely hers to find.

* * *

Amelia seemed distant to him as they walked to The Memory Den, so Hancock reached into his jacket and brought out a bottle of whiskey, presenting it to her instead of going through any motions of finding out what was bothering her. He was far too tipsy for that.

She glanced up at him, questioning eyes shining red and blue in the neon lights around them. "Is that Jameson?" she asked, looking down at the ripped label. "Please tell me it doesn't taste like garbage."

"Well, I sure hope it doesn't, because you're _tense_ , I can tell. You need it." Hancock chuckled and handed the whiskey over. She took it from his hands and looked hesitantly up at him, as if expecting permission to open it. "Dig in. I got a whole case of the stuff in the State House basement. Found it a couple weeks back."

They continued on their way through the street at a leisurely pace. Amelia unscrewed the bottle and took a brave swig. "Oh, wow," she mumbled, before taking another enthusiastic drink. Hancock watched her out of the corner of his eye, resisting the urge to laugh. A couple of people wandered over to them as they strolled, but for the most part it was quiet. The soft buzzing of neon paired with the chilly breeze in the air made him feel strangely at peace.

"So," Amelia said eventually, holding the bottle loosely in her hand and swinging it by her side as they walked. He chanced a glance down and saw that she'd already gone through almost a third of the bottle. "How'd a fancy ghoul like you come to be mayor of this town, anyway? You kill someone?" She turned to look up at him, and her eyes lit up like they had when she'd looked at him through candlelight earlier in the night. There were those Nuka-Cola eyes again. His heart did something funny in his chest and if he'd been sober, he would've laughed nervously and avoided the question completely, maybe even suggested they end the tour there and go their separate ways for the night.

"Yeah, I did," he said instead, turning to face her. She stopped walking, and they looked at each other in the street. Her smile was faint and woozy.

"For real?" she whispered.

"For real," he said. His voice had fallen into something quieter, secretive. He took a couple small steps backward, just enough to breach the darkness of a nearby alleyway, and she followed. "Name was Vic. Real asshole. I, uh…" he turned to point up toward his balcony. "… strung him up, threw him off'a there." He turned back to face her again, and she was staring up at the balcony in a sort of dumbstruck wonder, but she didn't look scared. Her eyes slid back over to him.

"Impressive," she commented, nodding slowly. "What'd he do?"

He sighed, looking away from her. He hadn't expected to go into this with her. Ever. "He ran this town like a tyrant. Kicked people's asses. I hung around with some drifters, so we didn't have houses we could hide away in. We saw it all firsthand. We all did nothing." He found himself reaching out toward her and she handed him the bottle of whiskey automatically. He tipped it into his mouth, passed it back. "I, uh… well, I blacked out after one such incident. Woke up in front of these sweet duds." He gestured down to his outfit. Amelia leaned back against the wall behind her, looking up at him with a small smile. "So, I put 'em on, got a crew together, started training. The night of, we waited for 'em to get good and wasted, and then we burst out of the windows and rooftops where we'd been hiding. Loaded bullets in every single guy on Vic's team, then we found Vic and… well." He shrugged.

"So, you threw him off the balcony," Amelia said, and it wasn't a question. She said it as if she understood.

"That I did, sister. And there I am, above his body, gun in hand and draped in these fine clothes, with all of Goodneighbor staring up at me." Something swelled up in him then. He felt pride, for the first time in a while. "I had to say something. That first time I said 'em, they didn't even feel like my words: "Of the people, for the people!" My inaugural address. Became Mayor Hancock of Goodneighbor, that day." He grinned down at her.

"Wow." For a moment, she looked stunned. "That's… admirable." She stared up at him. "Sounds like something out of one of my school textbooks, honestly."

"What, you don't believe me?"

"Oh, I definitely believe you. _Must_ have been a total dickhead to piss you off enough to do all that," she said with a confident grin.

"What makes you think I'm not easy to piss off?" Hancock asked, suddenly defensive. His mouth was still twisted into a smile, though, and she laughed. It had that same wild quality to it that it'd had before.

"You're a total softie." She took another swig of her whiskey and swallowed unflinchingly. "You know, outside of this whole anarchy and uproar you led to take leadership."

He raised his eyebrows, allowing himself to lean closer to her, and she stared up at him, any pretense of bashfulness or hesitancy gone. "Can't even handle a girl changing in front of him, though," she continued teasingly, turning her face away to hit the bottle again. " _Softie_."

He scoffed, but it was mostly to cover up the heat he felt in his face, his darting eyes. He realized dimly that he had one hand up on the wall behind her, was close enough to smell her hair. He felt out of his body for a moment. "What, no witty retort? Thought I'd figured you out," she shrugged, feigning nonchalance. "Guess I was wrong." The soft slur in her voice was apparent to him. She was drunk now, and he felt guilty, because he realized he wanted to kiss her. The feeling was surging through him like adrenaline, like a Psycho plunged straight into the neck.

It was usually so easy for him, flirting with someone, making moves on them. It was second nature. _Especially_ when he was as drunk as this. Hell, he'd knocked over every glass on the bar earlier because he was making out with some broad in the middle of a busy night, and he hadn't cared. But now, staring down at this vault-dwelling smoothskin, this… _girl_ who defied his expectations so quickly, asked him about books, listened to his long-winded stories and called him things like _admirable_. He didn't know how to navigate it. He felt he didn't really have a right to.

"Were you a ghoul?" she asked softly. "When you took over?"

Hancock's distant smile faded, and he looked away from her, at the brick behind her. "Yeah," he mumbled. "I took a drug. I knew what it was going to do, what I was going to turn into, but I…" he shook his head. "I just couldn't stand looking at the bastard I saw in the mirror anymore. The coward who'd let the ghouls from Diamond City die when _Mayor McDonough_ kicked them out. Who was too scared to protect his fellow drifters from Vic and his boys." He met her eye again, and she looked immeasurably sad. "I'd be free. Didn't seem like there was any other choice. Now I'm… this." He leaned more heavily against his outstretched arm. "Gotta admit, has some perks aside from the whole tenderized-meat appearance." He tried to chuckle, but it came out more like a sigh.

Without his expecting it, Amelia reached up and lightly touched the side of his face. He stiffened. "You're not a child's nightmare, you're not Boo Radley," she said softly, her lips softening into a smile. Her eyes were twinkling, but they still looked sorrowful. "You did what you believed was right, and I respect that." This surprised him, but he didn't say anything, so she kept talking. "Ever since I've gotten here, ever since you saw _me_ …" Her brows knitted together, and she looked away from him. "I could tell, even before you told me all this." She said it simply, as if he should know what she was talking about, but in a sense, he did. He just had no idea how she had found it out in such a short time, noticed it in his eyes. The wonder and confusion. The insecurity tucked away beneath his clothes.

He swallowed, and it prompted her to look back up at him. She almost looked like she was going to do whatever it was he was scared to do himself. "You don't seem real, Amelia," he said, finally finding his voice. It sounded rough, strained, but the fit of her name for the first time on his lips felt far better than 'smoothskin' had. "Not many people come walking into Goodneighbor looking the way you do."

Amelia laughed. Her thumb was running idly along the grooves of his cheek. Normally, he would have hated even the idea of someone touching him like this. Everything felt so fuzzy, though, and different. He wanted to reach out and touch her braid, see if it was as soft as it looked, but he stopped himself. She was delusional, lonely from all her time in a freezer, and now wandering around the Commonwealth for a month. This was a weird, drunken act of pity. It must have been.

"Not many people vomit all over the mayor, either," she whispered, winking at him. It was the third time she'd mentioned it now, and the third time it had sounded charming anyway. It shouldn't have sounded as alluring as it had then, but with the both of them pleasantly drunk and standing way too close together in the shadowy alleyway, hell, _anything_ she said would have sounded charming. "Or hog his bedroom for a week because of a petty injury."

They stared at each other for a long time before Hancock finally reached out a hand to touch her braid, hesitant. It was like silk to his ruined skin. He almost threw his bullshit inhibitions out the window, almost bent to kiss her it was so consuming, when someone's shadow darkened the entrance of the alley. "Hancock?" Jesus, it was Jade. Hadn't she gotten enough from him earlier? He dropped his hand from Amelia's hair, and she dropped her hand from his face, but didn't tilt his body away from her. Everything in him fought against the very idea.

"Busy," he called to her, and the girl rolled her eyes, but walked away and out of sight again. He turned back to Amelia, but she was moving out from under his arm already, pushing hair out of her face.

"I think I've gotten ahead of myself with the whiskey here," she said quietly. She was avoiding his eye suddenly. "I should… I should get to bed, probably." She looked back up at him, smiling apologetically. "Sorry for psychoanalyzing you."

Hancock just nodded numbly, watching her face. A spell had been broken. An illusion, a dream. "It's fine. Not enough people do it." He pulled his arm away from the wall, tried a grin, but she was looking away again, toward the entrance of the alley. "Do you want me to walk you back?" he asked.

Amelia shook her head, pressing the half-empty bottle of Jameson into his arms. "Oh, no, I'm okay, don't worry about me," she said. He cradled the whiskey, staring at her. She touched the collar of his coat briefly and smiled, but her hand was falling away before he could reach out to catch it, and she was turning, walking away from him.

He watched her go until she was out of sight. Then, he sank down and leaned his head back against the wall. He stayed there until daybreak, and when he finally came to enough to stand up, feeling hazy and wrong, the whiskey bottle was empty.

* * *

 **A/N: Okay, fine, so I'm not exactly being all slow-burn graceful like some of my HancockxSole shipping compatriots, but don't worry, it's gonna take a while before an actual kiss. There will be angst and conflict, I promise. I'll show _some_ restraint from here on out lmao**


	4. lullaby

"Fahrenheit— this is weird."

It was the next day, and Hancock was pacing in his office, his outfit somewhere halfway between the t-shirt and pants he'd changed into a couple hours before, and his normal frock coat get-up. His hat had been missing all day, but he wasn't particularly fussed with it. Fahrenheit watched him patiently from her seat on the couch, a cigarette balanced, unlit, between her fingers. Her hair was slicked back with sweat, a result of the sweltering August heat, and the bags under her eyes were especially dark. She hadn't been getting much sleep lately, which, as a result, made her far crankier than usual.

"Aren't you going to finish getting dressed?" she asked warily. "Or is this hangover of yours gonna make this yet another day of you being a drama queen?"

Hancock paused and looked at her dumbly, his American Flag sash hanging loosely from his fingers. "I'm… no!" His face twisted up into something confused and he looked away from her to take a quick hit of Jet from his other hand. "I'm—can't you just talk to me about something without making it a whole thing?"

Fahrenheit's eyebrows shot up in surprise. She pointed toward herself with the cigarette. "Me? I'm the one making a 'whole thing' right now?" She gestured back toward him, a wide sweeping motion to encompass his current state of full-body duress. "You seen yourself at _all_ today? _Me_." She scoffed and dug a lighter out from her pants pocket, nodding as she placed the cigarette between her lips. "Me, uh-huh, sure." She lit it and took one long pull with her eyes shut, her head leaned back.

"I'm just tryin' to open up my _heart_ here, Fahr, and you're all pissy with me from the get-go." He fell onto the couch across from her and kicked his bare feet up onto the coffee table, frowning. He looked worried, almost haunted, but Fahrenheit didn't seem to care. She rolled her eyes.

"Fine," she deadpanned. "What's wrong, Hancock? What can I do to help?" She leaned forward against her knees, a wicked smile zipping across her lips. "You want a foot rub, oh fabulous zombie mayor?"

He threw the empty Jet inhaler at her and she barked out a laugh, meeting his eyes rather intensely. "Okay," she said, raising her hands in surrender. "Seriously, what's up?" For a moment, she was understanding. The sharpness of her aura had dulled just a little.

Hancock sighed, his eyes fogging over all dreamy, and he sank back into the couch. The words were spilling from his mouth before he'd had the chance to think about whether or not it was a bad idea to admit it out loud. "I think I have a crush on the smoothskin."

Fahrenheit, though, merely shook her head and chuckled. "Yeah, and?"

"And _what_?" he snapped back, suddenly lucid and leaning toward her, his hands flat on the coffee table. She shook her head, still smiling.

"You have a crush on _everyone_ , Hancock, this is no different." She took another exasperated pull from her cigarette and blew it right into his face, her smirk widening. He glared at her and sat back again.

"You're lucky my sense of smell is piss-poor, Fahr, or I'd kick your ass for that."

"Whatever. So, you have a crush on the new girl, big whoop, she'll be out of your hair soon enough anyways." When Hancock arched on eyebrow at Fahrenheit, she gave him another annoyed look. "Jesus, Hancock, you haven't even heard about her yet? You lose your iron grip on the grapevine or something? She's not sticking around here, she's _looking_ for someone." She paused to ash her cigarette against the table. "She's here for the Memory Den, then she's outta town. Got some goings-on with Nicky and everything. Anyway, she's healed up regardless."

Hancock stared at Fahrenheit, as if not comprehending. "Nick?" he muttered faintly. If Nick was involved, it had to be something serious. Like, a kidnapping. Violence. Danger.

"Duh, Valentine?" Fahrenheit cocked her head at him, misinterpreting his disbelief as a lack of recognition. She scoffed, as if she were speaking to a clueless child. "He's been here for a day now. Followed her from Diamond City, if you wanna see him."

"No, I don't wanna see him!" Hancock sputtered. His hands tensed against his legs. "I wanna talk about this!"

"Oh, your crush, okay." She sat back and crossed her legs, eyes resting so lazily on his face he could tell she couldn't care to take him seriously, that it wasn't her intention from the start of this.

"It's _different_ , Fahr," he said anyway, his voice quieting. Despite his every intention to keep his playful hackles up with her all business as usual, he realized he didn't have the energy. And this certainly wasn't business as usual. "There's something about her."

With this, Fahrenheit rolled her eyes again, this time so dramatically they could have popped right out of her head. "I get it, Hancock, I do, but she's… a beautiful, shiny vault dweller. A preoccupied one, at that." She shrugged. "She probably doesn't even know what a raider is yet, or how to kill a Mirelurk. She's probably scared of _you_ , and every other ghoul here, she's just learned to have a real good poker face." She stared at him, as if this were something he ought to have known already, a caveat he should have been aware of enough to squash whatever feelings he had with it.

Something in Hancock's chest sank, something that had before been light, careless, a small whimsy he'd barely thought about pursuing. Now it was heavy, and it hurt, and it felt like something monstrous and all-encompassing. Something he couldn't ignore. He looked away from Fahrenheit, to an unopened Jet inhaler resting on the table.

"Thanks a lot, Fahr," he said, leaning forward to scoop it up. "Really solved my heartache." He took a hit, hard and automatic, and the rush almost knocked him out right away. Vision swimming, he stood and stumbled off toward the bathroom before Fahrenheit could say anything to him, anything else to indicate that his own adopted daughter thought he was nothing more than a reanimated corpse. "'m gonna go shower," he said over his shoulder, and slammed the door behind him.

* * *

Amelia stirred, feeling lightheaded and fuzzy. She'd been dreaming of something pleasant, a field of green grass and wildflowers. Laying there with her eyes closed, she found herself wanting to shove fistfuls of the vivid meadow into her mouth. Absorb it somehow. Maybe it could send her back, if she consumed it. She peeked her eyes open and Hancock's room came into blurry focus. She closed them again. Something so simple as bright colors and lush grass, now limited only to the imagination. After a long moment, she opened her eyes fully and glanced toward the window. The sun wasn't pouring in like it usually did in the morning, and it took her a moment to realize that this was because it must _not be_ morning. _Shitshitshit_.

She'd met up again with Nick on her way back to the State House the night before. "Whoa there, doll," he had called, grabbing her gently by the arm just as she'd rounded a corner. He'd been coming out of The Third Rail, his tie still undone and his step wavering and unsteady. He looked rather dazed, even cheerful. If she hadn't been so stressed at the time, she may have wondered how the hell a robot can get drunk in the first place. Maybe asked him then and there. As it turned out, she had just spun around to look at him blankly, her mind a flurry of unrelated thought. "What's the rush?"

"Nothing," she said, breathless. _Nothing nothing nothing._ It echoed in her head like a curse.

"Well," Nick released her, but he was still squinting at her, like he was suspicious, "we oughta get this ball rolling, huh? Tomorrow morning?"

She'd nodded desperately and dashed away before he could say anything else, before Hancock could resurface from the alley to catch her. She needed… something. She didn't know what, but it needed to be far from there. This new world was too real, now, after seeming so much like a distant fantasy throughout her entire journey.

As she stumbled into the State House and up the stairs, she couldn't help but think about her drunken night. The way Hancock had leaned into her, whispered openly about his past to her… it made her feel guilty. She had had no grasp of this world, no connections besides her nephew, but now something else was gripping her. It frightened her. The way he'd run his hands along her braid—or how he'd looked, for a wild second, like he'd wanted to kiss her—had scared her. But his eyes catching on moonlight, looking down at her like she was a treasure, had scared her the most. She was no treasure, but she didn't doubt that she was out of place in the Wasteland. Very out of place.

Amelia kicked the covers off her legs and laid there for a while, staring up at the ceiling, trying and failing to erase memories coming in an unbidden rush. Eventually, there were muffled yells, a shower squealing to life in the next room. She sighed. She would have to leave the room soon. She would have to see Hancock in the daylight, outside of the secret safety of darkness and the excuse of alcohol.

A knock sounded from the door, tight and sharp, and every muscle in her tensed. Amelia sat up, halfheartedly pulling the blankets back to cover her bare legs. "Come in," she called. Her voice was meek, hoarse. She wouldn't know what to say if Hancock came in now, and her thoughts grew frantic. What could she possibly say? Could she feign ignorance, pretend that she was too drunk to remember any of it? When the door swung open, however, she was not greeted by the anticipated swish of red fabric, but rather the frayed edges of a gray trench coat.

"Doll?" Nick peered into the room uncertainly. "Thought we were meeting in the AM? Nearly one in the afternoon, now." He stepped in and shut the door slowly behind him, watching her with the same cautious suspicion as the night before. "You alright?"

"I don't…" She groaned, laid her head in her hands. "I'm hungover. Don't wanna talk about it." Her voice caught a little and she knew he must have noticed. She was so transparent when she was upset. Nora always used to call her Baby Blue, because of how often she would burst into tears. It used to annoy her as a kid, but now she knew it was woefully true.

She heard Nick cross the room and, from the corner of her eye, saw him sit down beside her on the bed. "We don't have to start today, if you don't want to," he said quietly. She looked up at him and saw that he was smiling at her. "I know it's been hard for you. After—well—"

" _Kellogg_ ," Amelia gritted the name out without thinking, her face settling into a dull fury. She swallowed, and it almost instantly drained away. "No," she said softly. "We go today. I just need to get dressed first." She pushed herself to the edge of the bed and stood up shakily. Nick followed suit.

"Got some wobbly legs there, huh?" Nick remarked. Amelia turned to glare at him, only to see him grinning good-naturedly. "Fine, fine, put some pants on and we'll split." He turned away and walked pointedly toward the bookshelf in the corner, his back to her. She grabbed her jeans from the bedpost and wrestled them on, wondering with a distant panic what she would see in Kellogg's head.

* * *

She wasn't in the room. Why wasn't she in the room? "Fahrenheit, she's not in the room!" Hancock called out, his voice betraying panic. He stood stupidly in the doorway, eyes tracing the messy folds of the bedsheets, the soft indentation of her head against a pillow. She hadn't left, had she? But _she wasn't there_.

Footsteps came stomping from behind him and before he could turn, he was being forcefully shoved out of the way. "Did you look to see if—" Fahrenheit was in the room now, a flurry of irritated movement, looking for something. Very quickly, she spotted it: Amelia's knapsack tucked underneath the bed. She squatted down, pulled it partly out, and looked over at Hancock, her eyes heavy beneath the weight of complete and utter annoyance. "Think she would leave all her stuff here, huh?" She shoved the backpack under the bed again and stood up, huffing a tortured sigh. "You _do_ have it bad."

Hancock backed out of the room to return to his office. His feet moved automatically. He heard Fahrenheit shutting the bedroom doors behind her. "Sorry for being a dick earlier," Fahrenheit continued, too casually for it to be a real apology. "She's probably just out getting a drink, it's late—"

"Shut up, Fahr," Hancock said softly as they crossed the threshold into his office. He fell to the couch and stared blankly at the coffee table. Scattered across it were empty and full Jet inhalers alike, Mentats tins splayed open to reveal their colorful tablets, some Holotapes from residents that he hadn't bothered to listen to yet. But he knew there was a syringe of Psycho in one of the drawers, and it pulled at him, at the threads holding him upright and steady. He frowned. He hadn't felt _that_ in a long while.

Fahrenheit stood next to the couch and gazed down at him, her hand on her hip. "You've known her for all of a week, Hancock." Her voice had finally taken on something other than disdain: concern. "This isn't…"

"I know," he said. Without thinking, he shoved off his coat and threw it over the back of the couch. It slip almost immediately to the ground and landed with a delicate _thump_. "Too heavy," he murmured distantly.

Fahrenheit sighed again. "Fine. I'll go find her, you stay here and… wallow." With that, she departed, the scent of cigarette smoke and mint billowing out in her wake. She somehow always managed to scavenge toothpaste for them from somewhere, but it seemed to follow _her_ like a perfume. He mused that she might actually rub the stuff on her skin to distract from the inevitable scent of the Wasteland. He wouldn't blame her but, then again, Fahrenheit was not the type of girl he'd pick to care about that sort of thing. He filed it away to think about later.

His thoughts quickly turned back to the night before, in the absence of his musings about Fahr's hygiene, and he leaned forward to snatch a tin of Grape Mentats off the table. He popped two into his mouth at once and leaned back into the couch, closing his eyes.

 _You're not a child's nightmare._ When she'd said it, he hadn't believed her. For the whole of their conversation, even, he had seemed to shrivel further and further into himself. Full of doubt, suddenly insecure. And she'd noticed, and it'd spooked him. No one shook him up like that. And, normally, he didn't even _mind_ his grisly visage. He thought he was damn good-looking, for a ghoul and all, and he had had his fair share of smooth-skinned ladies in his time. Not like her, though. No one that… untouched by this world. He found himself not wanting to poison her with his radiation, as if it were seeping out of his skin at all times. He'd been honest when he'd said she didn't seem real. She _didn't_. He was convinced if he touched her, she'd fall through his fingers like sand. And that was unhealthy.

He opened his eyes again and stared up at the ceiling. He had to get a grip of himself. Pining after someone who was as good as a stranger to him was… creepy. Leaning forward, he picked a holotape up off the table and looked at it. _Pickman's Gallery_ was scrawled on the memo line. Maybe he'd turn his attention to something else, like getting someone to investigate whatever was going on over there. He stood up from the couch and tucked the tape into his pocket.

* * *

Amelia was still crying when she entered the State House, Nick and Fahrenheit bolstering her on each side. "He… he…" she hiccuped, her knees buckling. Everything seemed to be spinning in on itself, twisting violently. She choked on a wave of vomit, forcing it back down into her throat. She was _not_ about to barf again; Goodneighbor had seen enough of her bodily fluids already.

Nick hefted her back up, muttering something, and she got a sudden flash of memory and flinched away from him. He glanced up at the same time, golden eyes startled, and at first, she thought he'd noticed her reaction. Then she realized he was looking up, over her shoulder.

"Is she alright?" Hancock called from the top of the stairs, sounding hesitant. She turned to look up at him, her face streaked and blotchy. He was dressed in casual clothes again, and his hat was gone. It was bizarre to finally see, but when her eyes met his, she could only react to the whole situation by dropping her head and crying harder.

"Ah… no," Nick replied, patting her awkwardly on the back.

" _Fuck_ no," Fahrenheit amended, adjusting her iron grip on Amelia's arm. "I went to find her, and she was collapsed on a chair in the Den bawling her damn eyes out. Ole' Nick here refuses to spill the beans, and you _know_ that insufferable bitch Amari—"

" _She_ can tell you, when she's ready," Nick snapped to Fahrenheit from behind Amelia's back. "It's not my place, or anyone else's."

"Well, get her up here," Hancock said. He sounded distant, even quiet. It only served to disconcert Amelia even further. This whole night felt like a bad fucking dream. All the emotions inside of her were brawling at once, and no one was winning.

She didn't remember being carried up the stairs, didn't remember returning to the room she'd unintentionally commandeered for so long. All she remembered was the face that appeared over hers once she was laying down, the blankets pillowy and safe beneath her. Hancock, his eyes kind, voice hushed and careful.

"Do you want any lights on?" he was asking, but Amelia's voice was too far away for her to grasp. She closed her eyes, willing herself to find any semblance of sanity to hold onto long enough to answer, but the only thing that came to her was Kellogg's desperate face, his baby in the crib, a long hallway. She felt like a storm was brewing up in her stomach, electric and mean and unrelenting.

"Sunshine?"

Amelia's eyes snapped open. She stared up at him, tears already forming. "I killed someone," she said quietly. Hancock's eyes widened imperceptibly, but he didn't move away from her, or indicate discomfort. She always expected a negative reaction; it's how it would have been in the past. She would be in _prison_ , in the old world, but here, it was… normal. Expected. "I saw his memories tonight—name was Kellogg. And… I saw Shaun." She didn't know why she was talking, why she was telling him this. He didn't know about any of it. Perhaps it was to return a favor? "He stole my nephew, Kellogg did, but… I feel sorry for him." She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees. Hancock straightened up, stood uncertainly beside the bed for a moment, then sat down next to her.

"His wife—his _kid_ got killed. He lost himself, that's the only reason he ended up in my vault." She dug her fingernails into her wrist. She knew the story she was telling was disjointed and unfamiliar from any side other than hers, but it felt good to speak. To tell someone besides Nick. "It's the reason he stole Shaun, the reason he—" She choked, turning her head completely away from Hancock. She couldn't tell him _that_. She couldn't say it out loud, she couldn't make it real. Even though she had seen it herself, Nora's death existed as an abstract thought in her mind. It had to.

"That's why you were at the Den," Hancock said quietly. She could feel him staring at her, but she refused to look back at him. The white-hot hurt of what she'd already said was beginning to eat at her again and, for some reason, she didn't want him to have to see it in her eyes. She was about to tell him to leave, so she could bury herself beneath the covers and cry by herself, but something else came out instead.

"We used Nick, stuck Kellogg's cybernetic-whatever into his head, and afterward, when I woke up, I went to find him. And when I did, he opened his mouth and Kellogg's voice came out." Amelia swiped impatiently at her tear-streaked cheek. She shuddered. "Said, 'Hope you got what you were looking for inside my head'. F-Fucking… freaky." Anxiety was pulsing steadily through her, making her tremble so hard she bit her tongue.

Hancock let out a low whistle. "Yikes, sister."

Amelia laughed, finally turning back to look at him. He had one hand flat on the bed and he was watching her. Some of the tension in her body drained away, but she still shook. "Yeah, yikes." She was smiling broadly, suddenly cheered by his simple wording. "I lost my absolute fucking mind after that. I just collapsed on a chair next to him and started sobbing. Nick-without the leftover Kellogg-was back pretty quick, though, got all confused. 'Doll? Doll, what's wrong?'" She mimicked his deep voice, then chuckled. "Haven't told him he got all possessed yet, he's probably distraught." Her smile faded quickly at the thought.

She was about to go effortlessly on, to tell Hancock that Nick reminded her of her grandfather. That, ever since she'd rescued him a month ago, he held this warm affection for her, and she couldn't understand it. Even now, in a whole new world with new rules, she couldn't see someone caring for her. But she didn't say that. Instead, she shrugged. "Sorry," she said, forcing another sheepish smile.

Hancock frowned at her. "Sorry?" he repeated. He reached out and touched her arm. He was warm. "Ain't no sorry's here, sister. Don't apologize." His eyes were kind, then, and _real_ , and he didn't seem like the same person she'd talked to the night before at all. Right at that moment, she thought he was as true to himself as he had been before she ever arrived in Goodneighbor. A leader, someone to listen and reassure, someone who conquered. She almost cursed herself, then, for her fresh vault-dweller appearance; most of the time it sure made it hard to exist in the world. It changed people, distracted them. Sometimes she wanted to lay down in mud and rub it all over her face, but she imagined it wasn't as simple as that. Her mind was drifting, then, to ideas of how to appear more 'normal', to dirty herself up, when Hancock shifted on the bed, bringing her back to reality. She met his eye.

It was dark in the room, save for a large candle burning away on the bedside table. It was cozy. Hancock's face had that weird glow it had had the night before, in the moonlit alleyway, and his hand was still laid atop her arm, emanating its bizarre heat. She could see, then, really see that he had been handsome, before. He was still handsome, even past the self-induced agony of the drug he had taken, and aside from the ravaged skin that resulted from it. It was strange and moving, to see that someone's boisterous personality couldn't be squashed, not even by the devastating after-effects of nuclear war, nor even by such self-hatred.

Amelia never wanted to leave the room, in that moment. It was so removed from the destruction, lulling her into a false comfort, as if the world outside were only a mirage. She could exist there for the rest of her life, in delusion. Hancock was no different than anyone else she had known before the bombs dropped. If anything, he was better than them.

In the softly flickering light, they stared at each other. It felt raw, stripped down. It was a moment before he said faintly, "I hope you find your boy, wherever he is. You said you saw him?" Hancock lifted his hand gingerly away from her and laid it in his lap. He was still watching her, though, with a ghost of a smile on his lips.

Amelia felt a wave of happiness swoop through her chest. She was distracted by the joy, the idea of seeing Shaun again. "Yeah," she said, and she was really grinning. "Yeah, I saw him. Must have been around six years old, but… but just as I imagined he would be, when he was older. He was a baby, when…" It hung there, and she didn't finish the sentence. Her eyes clung onto Hancock's stare, as if it were an anchor keeping her just above the surface in that pleasantly dim room. "I _miss_ him. I need to get him back, for… for Nora." She said the name without sighing, without her eyes welling up. It was hopeful, the way she said it. She _would_ find him, for Nora. She'd bring him to the vault, too, when he was ready, and maybe they'd both be able to confront it, together. They could bury her behind the old house.

"Nora?" Hancock said. His voice was uncharacteristically quiet, even quieter than before. It was like he knew all about it already, with all the gentle patience he gave her.

"My sister," Amelia replied. She unraveled from her stiff sitting position, stretched out her legs in front of her and leaned back onto her elbows, against the pillows. Her leg settled against Hancock, but she didn't move it away, didn't even think about it. "My best friend." Her eyes finally drifted away from him, to the ceiling. "You know," she said, the thought dawning abruptly, though not unpleasantly, "she would sing a song to me when I couldn't fall asleep." She looked over at him, a fondness swelling away inside of her. " _You are my sunshine, my only sunshine_ ," she sang softly, searching his face. "Really did the trick, back then. It's what you call me—Sunshine."

Something passed between them, then, something stirred, really awakened. "It reminds me of her," Amelia continued, when Hancock said nothing. He was staring at her in that way again, almost, but this time it didn't seem to startle her. "I think that's why I like you so much. I mean, everything about you, really, is a reminder of my life before. The books, the fuckin' presidential get-up." She laughed a rich and relentless laugh before her face settled back into calm sincerity. Exhaustion took her, and she laid down, curled up against a pillow. "It helps."

She hadn't expected him to really say anything back. The whole thing had been one long one-sided venting session for her, after all. But then, he crawled over onto the bed, and she knew to scoot to the side to give him room, and he laid down right beside her, pillowing his head in his arms. "You help, too," he whispered, and then they fell asleep, and she dreamt of bright blue sky.


	5. chimera

**A/N: Hey, long time no post lol. Been stewing on this for a while. Went back and edited all four previous chapters in this fic, just to get rid of some inconsistencies and add some stuff, rounding it out some more basically. I also posted this over on Archive of our Own too, under the same name- ghoulfern. Anyway! Here it is! Haha.**

* * *

Amelia left the next day, and she took three books with her. It had been early morning, before the sun had properly risen, and Hancock had awoken to her sitting in front of the bookshelf, her fingers dancing gracefully across worn spines. _Can I take a few_? she asked, upon hearing him stir behind her. _Yeah, of course_ , he said, because he couldn't say no. _As many as you want_. She'd scoffed, shot him a coy look over her shoulder. _If I took as many as I wanted_ , she said, _you'd have nothing left._

Now Hancock watched her go from the upstairs bedroom window, and he smiled, as he supposed he was meant to, when she turned her face to look up at him, when she waved goodbye. Nick followed her across the square, bending to mutter something in her ear, and she turned away, her pale face again hidden behind manic black curls. Gone.

Fahrenheit stood beside him and, once Amelia was out the door and out of Goodneighbor, she sighed. "Sorry, boss," she said. Her voice was quiet, almost measured, as if she had been planning to say something different and then decided against it. "She'll be back, though, I bet." And then she left the room, left him to his own empty devices.

Hancock sat at the bed that hardly felt like his anymore and reached for the book on the nightstand, flipped quickly through it. His bullshit still sat in the margins, but it was now accompanied by a smattering of tiny, dog-eared page corners. She'd finished it, he would have known it even if she hadn't left a carefully scrawled confirmation on the back cover: _B- for social commentary_ , and he had no idea what the hell that meant, but he imagined it wasn't good. He held the book in his lap for a long while, thumb idly tracing the grooves and rips on the front cover. He felt stupid for already missing her.

* * *

For the first two months that she was gone, he reread almost every book on his top shelf. He thought periodically about writing to her, but wasn't sure if she would be in one place long enough to receive a letter. Besides, his handwriting was hardly legible. What would he say, anyway? _Hey Amelia, I feel weird and displaced. This might sound selfish, but could you come back? Maybe just take me with you? It sucks here without you, and I think it sucked before, too, I just didn't realize it until I met you. Okay. Thanks. Cordially, John Hancock._ And who the hell delivered mail, anyway? Who wrote _letters_? No. No, he wasn't going to do some stupid shit like that.

* * *

"She's busy."

"I know."

"Finding her _kid_."

"Nephew."

" _Still_. Finding _a_ kid."

"I know."

"Well, if you _know_ , stop _moping_. You're makin' me sick."

* * *

Four months later, Hancock sat across from Nick in The Third Rail.

"Last I heard," Nick said, metal fingers tapping against his glass of whiskey, "she was tied up with the Railroad." He met Hancock's eye for a second before looking away again. "She stopped by Diamond City, couple weeks back." He sounded guilty, like he was admitting something he shouldn't, and judging by the hurt blooming in Hancock's chest, he imagined in a sense that he was. Amelia had stopped by Diamond City to see Nick, but she hadn't stopped by Goodneighbor to see Hancock. He could have gone without knowing.

"She's safe?" Hancock asked. Nick looked back at him, and for a second, he swore he saw his golden eyes brighten.

"She's safe," Nick said, and smiled.

* * *

"Doesn't mean anything."

"It doesn't?"

"No. She barely _knows_ you, anyway."

"But—"

"And Nick is like a surrogate father for her. You'd have to be stupid not to see it. Of _course_ she'd visit him over you."

"Yeah—"

" _Don't_ make me call you dad, Hancock. Because I'll fuckin' do it."

"Please do not do that."

"Fine. Then _shut the hell up_."

* * *

It took eight and a half months for her to finally return, and by then _To Kill A Mockingbird_ was shoved all the way underneath the bed, due to scuffling feet and negligence. He forgot about the delicate loops of her letters, forgot what her handwriting looked like completely. He forgot the scent of her hair, and how he'd woken up at one point the night before she left with his face tangled up in it. He quite nearly forgot her face.

But then he saw her again, coming down the stairs into The Third Rail. It was nearly summertime again, and her freckles were dark, kissed by sun. Her hair was loosely pulled out of her face, her leathers were worn in and dirty, and she looked for all the world as if she wanted nothing more than to dive headfirst into bed. She was beautiful. And then she saw him through the crowd, met his eye and smiled wide.

No time had passed. None at all.

* * *

"John." It came muffled from his jacket collar, and it took Amelia a moment to realize that it was her voice, and that she was crying. It was rushing out of her, in desperate, cold waves that the Wasteland hadn't allowed her until now. That _she_ hadn't allowed herself until now. She snaked her arms around Hancock's shoulders, stood on tiptoe to bury her face into the warmth of his neck. Someone familiar, someone real to hang onto. But it wasn't just that. It was a relief for it to be _him_ , out of anyone else.

She felt herself drifting, very quickly, and when she opened her eyes again, she could hardly see anything. Blackened edges were creeping in, like a photograph burning. A hand on her back, the vague disappearance of her legs, and then her head was lolling, and she could see the bar, upside-down, fading away behind her. Someone was carrying her away.

"Again?" Fahrenheit. She sounded like she wanted to be annoyed but hadn't quite met the mark.

"Fuck off." Hancock, his voice a deep grumble against Amelia's side. "Get her some water or something, okay? Maybe… I don't know." She felt herself being set down somewhere soft. Hancock's bed. She opened her eyes. Everything was blurry and wet, so she closed them again. Breathed in the smell of wood and cigarette smoke through her nostrils, so deeply until she felt her body must be full of it, and then she breathed in some more. "A wet rag, too. She looks like she's gonna faint, or… I mean—I think she already did."

"Didn't know you still had that effect—"

" _Fahr_ , for fucks' sake."

"Fine, fine."

A door slamming, footsteps fading, every sound overlapping and repeating and echoing away into nothing. "I'm fucking sorry," Amelia said to what she thought was an empty room, her voice thick and hoarse. It was utterly disgusting, and as she really came to, opened her eyes long enough to remember that she was a living human being, she realized her face was saturated with tears, that her limbs were buzzing with panic and devastation. " _God_ , I'm sorry." She stared up at the ceiling, at the moldy tiling and cobwebs. How was she here again? After so long, how had she made no progress? How had she gone _backwards_ so fast?

"Sunshine?" The feeling of someone sitting down beside her. She turned her head, only caught one side of Hancock's face filtering into her vision. She blinked heavily, breathed out through her nose.

"I was too late," she said. The thought that'd been bouncing around in her head since she left the Institute, a thought so relentless in its cruelty that she'd given up trying to silence it. _Too late, too late_. "And now I'm fucking… _here_ , again." She brought a shaky hand up to her face, wiped the tears from one cheek, and flung her arm away. How pathetic that she was here, under virtually the same pretenses as nearly nine months ago.

The door slammed open again before Hancock could say anything, not that she had expected him to, and a cold, wet rag was thrown over her face without warning. "I found some purified stuff at Daisy's," Fahrenheit was saying, but it sounded all distant and warped. Amelia sighed into the rag on her face. "Oh, she's awake?"

"Duh." The weight on the bed shifted, lifted.

"You gonna be up here for a while? I can go talk to MacCready for her, they came in together right?"

"Yes, they did," Amelia said loudly. A snort.

"On it." Fahrenheit muttered something that she couldn't catch, and Hancock said something back that sounded a lot like _shut up_.

Amelia pulled the rag off her face once she knew the door had shut and, with tremendous effort, lifted herself up to lean back against the headboard. She looked up to see Hancock standing awkwardly beside the bed, staring at her. He'd taken off his coat and was just wearing the ruffled, open undershirt and pants. She wondered where the sash was, where he'd draped the coat, if he had left anything, or anyone, back at the bar because of her abruptly passing out in his arms.

"What, not used to me being a total wreck yet?" She'd meant it to be funny, to lighten the tension in the room, but it came out bitter and edgy. His dark eyes finally tore away from her, to the floor.

"Amelia," he said, finally, and something stupid and light zipped through her body, and suddenly she was sweaty and self-conscious. It felt like high school, it felt _ridiculous_. It felt like an insult to Nora's memory, to fucking _Shaun_ , to the months she had been wandering the Commonwealth and making her plans and sneaking around. Hancock's eyes found hers again, and she promptly looked away, to her feet, the boots no one had bothered to take off. "Do you—are you hurt?" He made a step toward her, but she threw her head back and fixed him with a look.

"No," she said stiffly. "I'm not hurt."

She saw him swallow, shift to the other foot. He looked distressed, his features straining together into some sort of full-face frown. And he seemed different than before, in a way that she couldn't identify. Thinner, maybe. "Did somethin' happen?" he asked, quieter.

Suddenly it was all there in sharp focus, colliding into her. She wished he had said nothing. She wished he wasn't there at all. She wished, with the vivid determination of someone who had nothing anymore to lose, that she had died somewhere along the way to Goodneighbor, that she had succumbed to grief in the week that they were traveling, that she had flung herself off a cliff somewhere.

"Yes," she gritted. She held his eyes, daring him to look away again. She was so _angry_ , and where was Nick? Where was that fucker _MacCready_? No, it was just Hancock. She was eating up his time again, gobbling it like some sick glutton, getting his sheets filthy with her unwashed clothes and shoes, and he was _letting her do it_. "Yes, something happened. Something fucking _happened_ , John." Then she was standing, scrambling up off the bed and pushing her palms into his chest, shoving him away, toward the door. She heard herself screaming as if it were coming from another room, another building completely. "Something—fucking— _happened_."

She had him pinned up against the door, her hands pressed into him, her chest heaving, and she was still so angry, because he didn't look scared of her. He didn't look mad at her at all. He just looked sad, and his hands were gingerly lifting, as if he meant to touch her, reassure her, brush the tears from her face. "Amelia," he said again, in a cautious whisper, and she threw herself away from him, spun around to face the window. The moon hung outside, lazy and glaring, and she stared up at it, hating it. Hating how it had stayed the same for two hundred years, and nothing else had. She let out an exasperated groan. "You don't have to tell me."

"No," Amelia said raggedly. "No, I do. I have to tell _someone_. It's…" She wrapped her arms around her torso and squeezed. "It's eating me alive." Footsteps from behind her, the squeak of the mattress dipping down. He was going to stay there and listen to her. Of course he was, and that almost made her want to cry harder.

"He was… he was older than _me_ ," she murmured. She turned away from the window to look at Hancock, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning down against his knees. Watching her, confused. "Shaun," she said, louder. The name caught in her throat, rattled around there, unfamiliar. "He was fucking—he was like, sixty. He's… he was—" She ran a hand through her hair. She didn't know how to continue. It felt so stupid, what she had to say. "He was the leader of the Institute, alright? He was… the whole damn thing."

She felt herself choke on the last few syllables, then something like her knees buckling beneath her. She had never said it out loud. After she came back from the Institute, and everyone crowded around her to ask what had happened, she'd said nothing. She'd just turned to MacCready and muttered _let's go_ and when he had grabbed her shoulder, asked if she was okay with his eyes all big and worried, she shook her head. _We have to go_. She hadn't known where they were headed until they were nearly there: Goodneighbor. And then she was reminded, upon seeing the neon lights buzzing outside the entrance, of the hope that used to exist within her. All that hope stretched out in front of her. The idea of burying Nora with Shaun, and how possible it had seemed, then. And she chased that feeling through the door, and found Hancock in The Third Rail, leaning against the bar, smiling all easy and wide with Magnolia. Like nothing had happened.

Hancock was up off the bed and had her in a hug before she took another breath, and at first, she resisted, clawed at his arms, but then she was sobbing into his chest again, her body going slack, her legs crumbling beneath her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry." He stroked her hair, leaned his chin against her head. It felt nice, like revisiting an old habit she'd nearly forgotten about. She let him hold her for a few minutes, until her tears and her anger finally subsided, and she could breathe evenly again. The rage still simmered uneasily in her stomach, but it wasn't so overpowering anymore.

"I have to get the hell away from here," she said finally, peeling herself away from Hancock. His hands hovered near her arms, like he didn't know whether he could touch her still, so she took a step back, turned away from him. Everything felt wrong, even standing there in Hancock's bedroom felt blasphemous. All she wanted now was Sanctuary.

"Then let's get the hell away from here."

Amelia turned around to stare at Hancock. He stood there smiling, as if he had merely commented on the weather. " _We_?" she repeated weakly, shaking her head. "No… you have—you have this whole place to run. I can't—"

"Can't what, take me away from it?" He chuckled, rolling up his sleeves to the elbow. He looked suddenly rejuvenated, bright, eager. "I'm _beggin'_ you to take me away from it, Amelia, trust me."

She stared at him, utterly disbelieving. All this time had passed, and he was still so willing to be around her. She had thought that the novelty would've worn off after a couple weeks of her being gone, out of his life, but here he was, asking to come with her wherever she went next. "You're—you're serious," she said faintly.

"'Course I'm serious," he replied, taking a step toward her. He was smiling easily, his eyes twinkling as he looked at her, and she found herself smiling back, because how could she not? Her eyes flicked down to his exposed arms, the tendons tight beneath rough, irradiated skin, and she swallowed nervously. She hadn't really realized it until right then, but… there was an issue. A wrench thrown into the mix, perhaps.

For all the time she hadn't been in Goodneighbor, sleeping in his bedroom, she'd thought about it. Whenever she was scared, or angry, or sad, she used the memory as something to stabilize her. Books and candles and soft bedsheets. And… She wasn't proud of it, but there had been a lot of nights where she'd thought about _him_ specifically, in various inappropriate situations, just to… you know, relax. Not _many_ nights, but they definitely happened. Once, or twice, or a dozen or so times. She couldn't help it.

"Okay," she said suddenly, in a rather shrill tone of voice, stepping back away from him. She was barely aware that she had a manic grin pasted onto her mouth, and she was holding her palms up toward him like she was surrendering something. "Sure, fine." Her thoughts had taken a turn and she was not about to go down that road when he was standing _right there_ in front of her. She was already flushing a little bit.

He beamed at her, not seeming to notice her tense body language. "Okay, great," he said enthusiastically. "Lemme just get some stuff together, make a speech, whatever—I'll be back." And then he was out of the room, the door slamming shut behind him.

She had not been expecting that. At all.

* * *

MacCready had been waiting for her in a booth, nursing a beer, when she came in and broke the news to him that his services would no longer be needed. He didn't take it all that well and threw his hat half across the bar in his fury, then promptly ran after it and picked it up again.

"You're ditchin' me?" he accused as he came stomping back to the table. He dusted the hat off rather theatrically, then shoved it back onto his head. "After _all_ we been through, Mel?"

She rolled her eyes, crossing her arms in front of her chest. "MacCready," she said evenly. "I haven't even paid you for the past five months. This is not a beneficial gig for you anymore." Still, he glared at her.

"So, bein' _friends_ don't mean anything to you?" he sputtered. He fell back down into the booth and pouted.

"Oh, come on," she snapped, frowning. "You know I love your foot rubs as much as the next guy, and that your charred Brahmin is _top notch_ ," she inclined her head toward him, raising her eyebrows as if to say _I fuckin' mean it_. "But I have to get out of here. I need a change." She came around and dropped beside MacCready, and he shot her a mean look, scooching away. "That doesn't mean I'll never see you again, dude!" She clapped him genially on the back and his determined expression faltered.

"Fine," he muttered eventually, succumbing to a small smile. He met her eye really seriously, before saying, even quieter, "you're not running off with that ghoul you're in love with, are you?"

Amelia reeled back from him as if slapped, then slowly came forward again, looking around to see if anyone had heard him. When it became clear that there were no eavesdroppers, she punched him, hard, on the arm. "I swear to God, if I ever hear you say that shit in public again—"

It was his turn to roll his eyes, then. He had the most self-satisfied smirk on his face, and Amelia could have pummeled him right there if she wasn't so goddamn tired and if, admittedly, she wasn't so fond of the stupid asshole. "Sure, whatever. So, are you?"

Begrudgingly, she answered, "yes." MacCready let out a whoop, and she was up and out of the seat instantly.

" _Not a word_ ," she warned him, before turning and stalking out of the bar.

"Get it, girl!" MacCready called after her anyway, directly disobeying her threat not even seconds after she'd made it. No part of her was surprised.

* * *

After Hancock had made his 'I'm way too comfy' speech (that, admittedly, he'd been planning since his safehouse had been broken into a few months back, and had obsessively gone over every other day since), he went straight to Daisy. Night was just beginning to settle in, and it was nearly time for the shops to close, but she seemed to be waiting for him anyway, leaning against the counter and playing around with a combat knife.

"Fancy seein' you here," she remarked, raising her eyebrows. She gestured somewhere to her right. "Nice speech back there."

He gave a little bow. "Thanks, only been practicin' it for months. Just had to wait for the right opportunity," he said, grinning. Everyone had taken it a lot better than he'd expected, and Fahrenheit was itching to get stuff done by herself. She'd been very enthusiastic, actually, about his leaving, and had been encouraging him to just go off on his own for the past couple of months. He'd always politely declined, saying he was _waiting for the right moment_ and knowing full well that that moment was Amelia finally coming back. But he was under no obligation to admit that to Fahrenheit, even if she herself was fully aware of it anyway.

Daisy shook her head, chuckling. She slid a few Jet canisters across the counter toward him, and he immediately pocketed them. "You got it real bad, John. Goin' away with the vault girl, I presume?" She lifted her eyebrows, and when Hancock opened his mouth, and nothing came out, she laughed. "Hardly a vault girl anymore, though. She looks good. Better. Don't think she'll be vomiting all over your shoes anymore." She pulled a serious face, leaned closer to him. "Unless you're into that sort of thing."

"I am _not—_ " He abruptly cut himself off when Amelia came sidling up out of nowhere, a bulging knapsack hanging off one shoulder. She was tucking something that looked like a carefully folded piece of paper into her pocket and humming happily to herself. Had she been _right_ next to them, stocking up at KL-E-0's, that entire time?

"Hey," she said, looking up. She lightly touched Hancock's arm in greeting and he hopped backwards away from her. Daisy was smirking at him, he could see out of the corner of his eye.

"I was just stockin' up," he said quickly. He shot a glance to Daisy. "Daisy, didn't you have a new shipment of shotgun shells for me, or was I just _makin' that up_?"

Daisy snorted and turned away. "Uh-huh, I'll go get that for you, _Mayor_."

"Thanks," he said stiffly.

"I just dropped off those books in your room, got some ammo from KL-E-0. You almost ready?" Amelia asked.

"...books?" Hancock repeated idiotically, staring at her.

"Yeah. Those books I borrowed before I left." She seemed weirdly energetic for someone who'd been so apprehensive about taking him with her not fifteen minutes before. She had changed her clothes, too, thrown on a new t-shirt and pants underneath a harness. He blinked dumbly at her, momentarily not able to vocalize. She _did_ look good, somehow better than she had before. Her skin had a healthy, pink tint and she wasn't as sickly thin as she had been when he first met her. Her hair was… bigger, somehow. Frizzy? But it looked damn good held up in a messy bun on top of her head. And she had a heavily-modded pistol tucked into her belt. _Nice_. "John?" She was squinting at him now, suspicious.

"You look good," he blurted, then looked away just in time to make eye contact with Daisy, who was reemerging from the back of the store, holding a box of ammo. She was clearly stifling a giggle behind her other hand. At least she had the decency to try and hide it this time.

Amelia, though, only smiled, and any distrust drained away from her face. "Thanks," she said quietly.

"Here you are," Daisy drawled, handing over the box of shells. Hancock snatched them out of her hand and glared at her. "Better get a move on, you two." She didn't falter in her relentless smirking, and Hancock almost wanted to reach across the counter and strangle her. "The cover of darkness and all that." She waved her hand vaguely.

"She's right," Amelia interjected, clearly unaware (or purposefully ignorant) of the tense interaction unfolding in front of her. "We should head out. I have food and stuff for the road." She hefted her knapsack up on her shoulder for emphasis. "You ready?"

He'd never been more ready in his life.

* * *

They only got as far as a few blocks before Amelia sighed and dropped her pack to the ground, right in the middle of the street. Hancock gave her a confused look, but she shrugged.

"You wanted out of there," she said simply. "You can tell me why later." _No way in hell,_ he thought. She looked away from him to survey the buildings around them. "We can camp out for the night. I'm tired."

They found a suitable shelter in an old convenience store's basement. "I prefer places that have locked doors," Amelia muttered, fiddling with the lock on the door. Hancock peered over her shoulder, intrigued by this new Wasteland confidence that she had developed. "Raiders are lazy. Mutants are stupid. Ah-" The lock audibly clicked, and when she turned the handle, the door creaked open. She grinned and pushed it open all the way.

It was like the room had been waiting for them; it hardly looked touched. Cans and boxes of snacks were scattered all over, as well as a few crates of Nuka-Cola and water. "Oh, fuckin' jackpot," Amelia whispered, creeping forward. Hancock watched her from the doorway. He felt like he was dreaming. There was no way this place hadn't been raided, just because there was a locked door in the way. He wasn't that lucky. But maybe she was.

She turned to look at him. "What are you doin'? Close the door and come find something to eat." She bit her lip, smiling, and spun away from him to sift through a box of cans on the floor. He was reminded vividly of that night when he'd caught her reading in his bed, when she'd smiled at him in the candlelight. God, he was in it now.

It was a bit dark in the room, so he felt around on the walls for a switch and— _there_. He flicked it on, and the room was bathed in fluorescent light. He shut the door tightly behind him and locked it. Amelia carried on with her animated scavenging, complete with various _ooh_ 's and _oh my god, nice_ 's, while Hancock set up sleeping bags in one corner of the room, making sure to keep them a fair distance apart. He fished a lantern out of her pack, lit it, and turned off the harsh overhead lights. It was… cozy.

Eventually, they both settled down together in the corner on their respective sleeping bags. Cans of Cram, potato crisps, Nuka-Cola, and Sugar Bombs surrounded them in little piles. "Feast for a king," Hancock commented as he shrugged off his coat, and Amelia laughed.

"You're quiet tonight," she said after a moment. When he said nothing, choosing to crack open a Cola and take a big, self-conscious chug instead, she looked at him. "Can I ask you a question?"

 _Oh, Christ_. "Sure," he said quickly, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Could you… look at me?" She said it around a laugh, but she still sounded unsure of herself. He turned to look at her, and she smiled shyly. Her dark eyes flickered in the lantern light's dancing flame. He blinked, trying to get the aged image of her in an alleyway out of his mind. "Um…" He was aware that his heart was thumping violently in his chest, and he wanted more than anything to reach into his pocket for some Jet, but that might be rude when she was trying so hard to be serious. "What did Fahrenheit say to you? Back in Goodneighbor, after she said she was gonna go tell MacCready what happened to me?"

Well, he hadn't expected that. But he also didn't want to _answer_ that. He sighed. "She asked me how you'd been able to hire him if you hadn't been to Goodneighbor in the past eight months," he admitted, his tone taking on something bitter without his meaning to. It was aimed more at Fahrenheit, the smartass, but he had asked himself the same question as soon as he saw Amelia that night, walking into the Rail with the young merc. The guy rarely left his spot in the bar, so she must have _had_ to visit to be able to get to him. But he hadn't seen her at all. Which meant she had snuck in.

Amelia seemed to realize this, herself, because she finally looked away from Hancock, to the can of Cram in her hands. She fiddled with the paper label for a moment, tearing at it. Some of her hair fell out of her bun, framing one side of her face in wispy curls. "I went with Deacon," she said after a long moment. "He said MacCready was good at what he did, and I was… well, I was scared. Didn't wanna go off by myself to do certain… things." She looked back at him. "I didn't mean to sneak around you, but I guess I sort of did. I'm sorry. Trust me, I-" And then she paused, stuttered something small and inaudible, and tore the Cram label off the can in one pull. "It wasn't my intention to avoid you," she amended finally. She crumpled the label up and tossed it gently across the floor.

Hancock reached out to touch her arm, and her head jerked up. Her eyes were all shiny with tears again. "Don't worry about it," he said quietly. When she sniffled and said nothing, he sought out her hand, and when he found it, soft and open, he twined his fingers with hers and squeezed.

"I missed you," she whispered. At first, he wasn't sure he had heard it right. But then she scooted over closer to him and leaned her head against his shoulder, still holding tight onto his hand, and she tucked her legs up underneath her, and she let out what sounded like a contented little sigh. "MacCready's an idiot," she muttered, then yawned cartoonishly. "A nosy… loudmouthed… idiot."

Hancock waited until her breathing slowed before he let his head fall back, hard, against the wall behind him. He shut his eyes. "I missed you, too," he answered back, far too late. Eventually, he fell asleep to the sound of her soft snores and the feeling of her wild hair against his cheek. He dreamt of dark ocean waves, and a siren's song rumbling from the deep, black depths.


	6. loss

**a/n: sorry this literally took so long for me to post lol. been busy with a new job and whatnot. kind of gave my own spin to hancock and the mayor's relationship as brothers, also couldn't find mcdonough's real name so i just went with 'guy', and i have no idea if this is canon, but for the purpose of my story, he's a couple years younger than hancock!**

* * *

Hancock awoke to Amelia curled up against his leg, her breathing even and small. Her wild hair was draped almost entirely across her face in overlapping, curly tendrils and her freckles were dark and abundant, like stars against a pale sky. He reached out, slowly, and pulled some of her hair away from her eyes, tucking it as gently as he could behind one of her ears. A soft exhale escaped her mouth and she turned her face, nuzzling further into his thigh.

His heart felt distinctly _wrong_ inside his chest as she did this, as if it were pumping upside-down. He wanted her to reach into his destroyed body and right it again, with her delicate fingers, hands that had touched things before the bombs ever dropped. Maybe her touch could cure him, somehow.

He wondered if this was what it felt like to be in love with someone. And then Amelia's eyes fluttered just barely open, and she was turning her face and smiling up at him sleepily, and he knew immediately that it was.

* * *

"I'm bringing as much of this with us as possible," Amelia was saying, reaching into a crate nearby to grab a handful of Cram cans and shove them into her knapsack. Hancock was busying himself by rolling up their sleeping bags and dousing the lantern flame, but Amelia could tell something was wrong with him. The way he moved about the room was stiff and self-conscious and entirely unlike the Hancock she knew. She didn't want to say anything, though. It had been so long since she'd seen him last—perhaps he'd changed. "You have any preferences?" She turned to look at him and saw that he was already staring at her, frozen in the action of putting a canister of Jet to his lips. He pulled it away without huffing and shook his head.

"Nah, I'll eat anythin'." He flashed her a grin that seemed to dissolve just as soon as it graced his lips, and then he was spinning away to put stuff into his own pack. He hadn't put on his coat yet—instead, it was folded near his things, and his hat was resting atop it. She watched him, the way his shoulder blades moved against the fabric of his shirt. Out of every mashup of outfits Hancock donned, this was undoubtedly Amelia's favorite. Seeing him in just the ruffled shirt and tight pants really pushed the tantalizing image of him lounging on the deck of a pirate ship, bossing people around as they cut through a wide, open ocean. She squinted at his back.

She hadn't been weird last night, saying she'd missed him, had she? Maybe she'd crossed a line? Maybe, even if she hadn't said that stuff, she'd still _acted_ weird? Her heart sank just a fraction at the thought and she turned away, sifting through another crate of food. She unearthed a box of Blamco Mac and set it aside to take with, then stared at it for a long moment, thinking. If it was already uncomfortable between them, she might as well make it worse, and at least get some answers from it. They were close enough to Goodneighbor that he could go right back home if she _really_ offended him. She shifted on her knees, then sat back fully on the ground.

"So," she began, keeping her voice light, "why were you in such a rush to leave last night?"

The rustling indicative of Hancock packing his things halted completely, and she turned to look at him. He was slightly bent over, staring at her over his shoulder. When she arched her eyebrow and didn't look away, he straightened up. He looked like he was in pain. "Aaaah…" he said, rubbing at the back of his neck. She smiled stiffly.

"You don't have to tell me if it's _that_ big a deal," she commented quietly, turning back to her food crates. She was beginning to think maybe taking her with him had been a bad idea, that she liked him way more than he liked her, that he was too impulsive for his own good, coming with her, and it could end up hurting her somehow.

"No!" he said, and it came out so loudly that Amelia looked over at him again. He was squatting back against the wall now, idly playing with his Jet inhaler and staring at the floor. "Uh, it was really nothin'," he continued, finally glancing up at her. She felt her lips quirk up toward a more genuine smile, then, when he met her eye. "Daisy was givin' me shit."

"About?" Amelia prompted despite herself.

His facial expression tightened up a bit at this, but he answered, his voice low, "about you."

She bit back something like a relieved laugh. "Okay, so, like what?" she asked, dimly registering that her voice had gone all trembly and nervous. She was anticipating something, some sort of admission, so that maybe the self-deprecating thoughts in her head could be disproven, or the more wild thoughts could be curtailed with some action. Even if he didn't like her that way, he was _certainly_ a man of action.

Hancock rolled his eyes, then dropped down to one knee to finish shoving junk into his knapsack. She suspected it was for the excuse to preoccupy his hands and hide his face, because the next thing he said made her own face flush hotly.

"Basically that you're… uh, more attractive now, I guess," he said to his bundle of Stimpaks, gently tucking them away for the road. "Since… travellin'. In the Wasteland. Weathered, I guess, but in a different way. Strong." He was rambling, and Amelia herself was begging him in her mind to stop, because this was not exactly what she'd expected to hear, but he seemed to have no intentions to. "Not, uh… not _delicate_ , like straight-from-the-Vault, sick in the street. She said—" He finally stopped, then, and looked up from his knapsack with a vaguely mortified expression.

Despite sitting there wallowing in her own embarrassment the entire time he'd been talking, Amelia found herself egging him on at the pause. "What did she _say_?" It came out almost as a whisper. They could have been gossiping, casually, had the subject matter not been about _her_ and how… hot she was?

Hancock looked across the room at her rather helplessly, then shrugged, grimaced, and said very quickly, like the words were vaulting over one another to get out of his mouth before the others, "she said you probably wouldn't be barfin' on anyone anymore, then implied that I was into that sort of thing, and that's when you… uh, when you walked up."

Amelia stared at him for a moment. He looked _humiliated_ , which made it all the easier to burst out laughing. She was cackling, full, from-the-belly laughter, and Hancock watched her as if witnessing someone succumbing to intense radiation poisoning. "Oh—my— _God—_ " She wiped at the tears streaming down her face, giggling like mad. "That's— _it?"_ She let out a rather embarrassing guffaw, and the laughter finally began to fizzle away, but she still felt the happy aftershocks rumbling throughout her body. She was glad she had asked; she felt heaps better.

"What do ya' mean, that's _it_?" Hancock cried, abandoning his things and throwing up his hands. "It's…"

"…a _joke_?" Amelia snorted and went back to packing food away. "Yeesh, John, you'd think you were a prude or something."

There was a shuffling from across the room, then a sigh. "It's different."

"Different how?" She topped her new food surplus off with a bottle of Nuka Cola Quantum and clasped the bag shut carefully. It was bulging, but she would have been insane not to take as much as she could reasonably pack.

"It's different when it's about you."

 _Oh_. So, it was like the pants incident all over again. She stared down at her backpack, wondering if she should say anything to that. Wondering if there was anything she _could_ say. Did that mean he wasinterested in her? Or maybe it was the complete opposite, that he saw her as a sister of sorts, someone to _avoid_ sexy thoughts about? She looked over at him, but he was busy shrugging into his coat by then, his back to her.

Amelia stood up and lifted her knapsack from the ground. It wasn't as heavy for her as it would have been 9 months ago, and she hitched it up onto her shoulder feeling vaguely proud of herself. Damn straight she could carry around an obscene amount of food on her back without breaking a sweat. She smiled, but it faded in the memory of Shaun's elderly face staring back at her. Familiar guilt settled in, and _that_ was too heavy. She cleared her throat.

"We better head out," she said rather gruffly, crossing the room to the door without looking at Hancock. "We're going to Diamond City, by the way. You can wait outside if you want, but I brought a gas mask for you just in case." She wrenched open the door and held it there for Hancock, who trudged up behind her. She felt very bitter, beneath all her usual guilt about her nephew. Bitter about Hancock, and how confusing all of this was becoming for her. How it wasn't just about the trivial daydreams she had had about him on the road, anymore. It had become something bigger. But then she sank back into the familiar, quiet insecurity she'd held onto as a librarian in a city that never saw her, and the thoughts were wiped away. There was nothing there. Couldn't be. She climbed the stairs.

* * *

Piper was locked out. Again. Amelia approached the scene feeling very much like she'd travelled backwards in time, only Hancock was hovering by her side this go around. "Not letting smoothskins in, anymore, either, huh?" he remarked quietly. Amelia shot him a wry look over her shoulder.

"Just the reporters," she said with a little smile. Then, "Piper!"

Piper spun around, eyes wide, but as soon as she spotted Amelia, her face broke out into a grin. "Blue!"

 _Blue_. Another nickname that harkened back to her previous life. To Nora. Piper approached them, her coat billowing out behind her. Her smile was true, but her eyes held a darkness as she said, "That hack McDonough locked me out _again_. Think you can sweet talk our way in, like last time?"

Hancock seemed to fidget next to Amelia, but she took no real notice. He was probably anxious about being there at all. She could sympathize.

"I guess I can," Amelia said, her voice teasing. She approached the intercom and bent down, tapping on it. "Daaanny?" she sang into the speaker. "It's Amelia. Lemme in, I got that Grognak issue for you."

"Oh! Oh… 'Melia, I dunno. I know Piper's out there," came Danny's uncertain voice. There was some muttering behind her and she glanced over her shoulder. Hancock and Piper were whispering to one another. She frowned. Did they know each other? She shook the thought out of her head, turning back to the speaker.

"Dude, it's cold out here," she said pointedly, for a moment shedding the sweet voice she'd been putting on. She was getting tired of the security in the City, all undying devotion to McDonough, like he was worthy of their loyalty. "And dark. Woke up late, took me all day to get here." When Danny didn't respond, Amelia fell down onto her knees theatrically, even though he couldn't see her doing it through the intercom. " _Pleeease_?" she crooned into the speaker.

Piper snorted from behind her. "Gotta admire her dedication." Hancock muttered something in response, which got a barking laugh out of Piper.

"Ugh, _fine_." The door began to lift, and Amelia jumped to her feet, smiling gleefully. "I know you're gonna bring Piper in with ya', but I feel bad. And I want that Grognak. Just… keep it on the down low, alright?"

"Sure thing," Amelia sang back, before spinning around to face her friends. Piper flounced right past her and through the entrance, clapping her genially on the back as she passed.

"See you on the inside, Blue!" she called.

"Sure got a way with words, huh?" Hancock was suddenly standing beside her again. He sounded uneasy, and when she glanced over at him, he had his hands shoved into his pockets. "Silver tongue."

"If you don't wanna go in," Amelia said quietly, looking up at him and touching his arm, "you don't have to."

Hancock's head jerked around at the contact. "No, I should. Ya' got that mask?" He was vulnerable again, his eyes softer than usual. She wanted to reach up and touch his face, like she had so long ago. It felt almost the same, this moment.

"Uh—" Amelia blinked and looked away from him, pulled her hand away from his arm to dig around in her knapsack. She unearthed the mask and brought it out with a flourish. "Here!" She handed it to him and, before he could spot how red her cheeks had gotten in the low fluorescent lighting of the entrance, she began to walk ahead of him.

* * *

Once he had shed his coat and hat and shoved them both unceremoniously into his knapsack, Hancock pulled the gas mask over his face and began the walk to what felt like his inevitable death. Amelia trailed ahead of him, a gentle bounce in her step, her hair braided and swinging against her back as she walked. He wanted to call out to her, tell her to wait for him, but he didn't.

The nervous energy inside of him had been crying out for reassurance, but with every step he took closer to Diamond City, it seemed, bizarrely, to hush. He thought about Takahashi's noodles, and seeing Nick in his own office, and drinking with the Bobrov brothers again. Familiarities hidden in all the danger.

He didn't think about Guy at all—that is, until he appeared quite suddenly to greet Amelia just before she made it to the entrance of the city, his arms wide and welcoming and his smile entirely ingenuine. Hancock stopped walking just a few feet behind Amelia, who was turned toward the Mayor with a dark expression on her face. _Good_ , he thought. He had, of course, believed that she didn't like the man before now, but seeing physical evidence of it was rather moving.

"Amelia," Guy greeted, and Hancock frowned behind his mask. He hated that voice. Patronizing. Nothing at all like his brother had sounded, before… all this. "What brings you here on this fine day?"

Amelia stared up at the mayor, her eyes steely and guarded. She thrust her finger out to point at Hancock, who flinched from the sudden identification, and said sharply, "just showing a friend around. Need to get some stuff from the house. That alright with you?" Hancock had never heard her sound so distinctly unfriendly, but Guy sure must have, many times before. His smile didn't falter as he waved vaguely in Hancock's direction without looking.

"Both welcome, both welcome. Carry on," the mayor said, gesturing grandly toward the entrance. Amelia stalked away without another word to him, and Hancock followed her as quickly as possible, to not rouse suspicion. But as he passed Guy, he cast a glance over his shoulder to look at him, something he couldn't help but do.

He had the same pudgy face, the same ridiculous nose… but the mischief in his dark eyes was gone. He might have been less of a wild child than Hancock had been, in their day, but he was still a McDonough, still notorious in his own right. Now, though, there was nothing.

Hancock turned away and climbed up the stairs into the city. His chest felt heavy, full of grief. He wasn't scared at all anymore, no, but he didn't want to see the shell of the place he'd grown up in, either, not after seeing Guy look so empty himself.

"Amelia," Hancock called gently, weakly, just as he crested the top stair. He needed her to slow down, to help him return. He couldn't dive in all by himself. He hadn't been there in so long, he didn't remember the number of years anymore, had stopped counting.

She stood just inside the entrance of the city, staring out at it with a wistful sort of smile. He stared, too, unable to stop himself, and his breath caught. It looked exactly the same.

Vivid, dreamlike memories bloomed suddenly inside of his skull, and he was yanked back through time as he stared down at Takahashi's with watery eyes. Amelia disappeared from his sight, and he felt a heaviness lift away from him, as if he was taking the gas mask off. He felt sunshine beating against his face, against soft skin. He felt his youth like a warm blanket.

 _Dare you._ Guy's voice, small and young and timid as ever, but right there beside him, as real as if he were there. _Dare you to shut 'im down._

John had laughed at his baby brother, clapping him hard enough on the back that the boy stumbled a bit. They'd been walking through the market together, John taking unconcealed swigs from a bottle of beer every so often, Guy staring over at him in perplexed wonder. John had been fifteen then, going on sixteen, already all slender swagger, charm, and unconcern. Guy had been the opposite, twelve years old and chubby, unsure, the mirth in his eyes something watered down and typically shoved away. Only when he was with John did he get all finicky and full of half-baked plots, grinning behind one hand as he watched John play out their pranks in the market.

 _Turn off the 'bot, huh?_ John had repeated softly, gazing down at his brother. He tipped the remainder of the beer into his mouth and shot the bottle toward a garbage can in one smooth, undoubtedly practiced motion. It fell directly into the trash as if guided by some omnipresent being's hand, and Guy watched its trajectory with his mouth hanging open, not registering that John had said anything until he nudged Guy with his elbow. _Eh?_

Guy nodded vigorously, guiding John away toward an awning, his wide brown eyes shining. Once under cover, he whispered to John with comical caution, _I found his manual in the mayor's office._ John's eyebrows had shot up and he'd actually giggled, grabbed Guy's shoulders gleefully.

 _You were up in the mayor's office?_ he'd repeated, and suddenly their roles had reversed, just like that. It happened often. Guy had his small moments of rebellion that impressed John into silence or disbelief, and then they were on the same playing field. John loved those moments so much more than he loved teasing his younger brother. Having a friend like that.

 _Fine_ , he'd said, grinning. He squeezed Guy's shoulders and pulled away, then held an expectant hand out. _Give it up and I'll get right on it_.

"…John?"

Amelia was looking up at him in place of Guy, her delicate features drawn together in worry. She was waving a hand in front of his face, but as soon as he gave an acknowledging sort of grunt, she dropped her arm. "Sorry," he said after a long moment. He still felt like a part of him was submerged in the past, and he wasn't altogether sure he wanted to pull it out. "Just haven't been here for a… a while."

Amelia reached for his hand and grabbed it. He flinched at the contact but twined his fingers together with hers; it was grounding. "I'm sorry," she whispered. Her big, dark eyes were staring up into his dark gas mask, and he _really_ wanted to be able to take it off, then. "I hadn't even thought… not really…" She shook her head, looking mildly distraught. Her hair was coming out of her braid in long wisps, and she was red in the face, as if her encounter with the mayor had worked her up. She seemed exhausted. "…I've only been thinking about myself today. I'm sorry."

Hancock didn't say anything, still too preoccupied with his memories to bother, but Amelia pulled at his hand and guided him slowly through the market. "We'll go to Nick's, and you can relax there for a while. Won't have to wear the freaky mask." She smiled at him over her shoulder, but he wasn't looking at her.

He was staring in wonder at all the market stalls, the decades-old ads still plastered to the walls, the rust and the dirt indicative of so much time passing. They were outside Valentine's Agency before Hancock had even registered that they'd left the market. He was still clutching onto Amelia's hand, as if it were the only lifeline to the present, as she pushed open the door.

Nick Valentine sat at his desk, idly shuffling through papers, a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. When they entered, his golden eyes flicked up, and at the sight of Amelia, he stood. "Doll," he greeted warmly, coming around the desk toward them. "Who's your creepy friend? Recognize the garb…" Then, his gaze dropped to their intertwined hands, and he smiled.

Hancock pulled his hand out of Amelia's to yank off the gas mask. He threw the damned thing to the ground and fell back into an armchair. "Hey, Nicky," Hancock said weakly, looking up at the detective. Nick's smile brightened impossibly more.

"Nice to see you back here, John," he said.

"Nice to be back," Hancock said quietly, and it wasn't entirely a lie.


End file.
